Session 7: Central China
Timothy Brook, University of Toronto
“The Formation of an Occupation State in Central China, 1937-45.”
Brook said the paper came out of a wider project to look at the creation of grassroots collaboration in the Yangtze delta between Shanghai and Nanjing in the winter of 1937-8. He noted that he was particularly interested in the relationships developed between Japanese pacification agents and local elites as the Japanese army moved west and left behind them occupied territory that needed to be administered.
Sources: Brook said he used a range of archival and non-archival sources. The pacification teams sent in by the Japanese army wrote regular reports back to Shanghai. He also used the No. 2 archives in Nanjing, the Shanghai municipal archives, as well as the memoirs written by many of the Japanese who were pacification agents, (their memoirs were actually written during the war and so were part of the wartime propaganda effort). Brook also used the fairly numerous publications of the collaboration state.
Approach: Looking at how state-building occurs under an occupation period, by
focusing on the Reformed Government, established in Nanjing at the end of March
1938. Brook said he was interested in the process by which the state has to
begin to establish a grassroots and then build up from the grassroots to the
county level – or really start at a country level, go down to the local market
towns and then work its way up to a province and then to a nation.
Brook noted that his interest was not just in administrative structures but also in the way Chinese were engaged in collaboration regimes. Though in many ways the regimes were a Potemkin Village, nonetheless millions of Chinese lived under collaborationist regimes and took part in their activities.
Brook said he had three proposals for ways of looking at the collaboration period:
1. Chinese were active during this period: an occupation state can only function if it is genuinely collaborative – if Chinese come forward and actively work with Japanese people. This is true even though both sides are inevitably disappointed with the arrangements.
2. During the war, China disappeared: China became at least six different countries or sovereignties, based in different parts of the country. These overlapped – and competed with each other. (Brook added that he would revise the part of his paper where he said that when the Japanese army withdrew, the regime collapsed. Rather he wanted to say that the Nanjing government collapsed not just because the Japanese withdrew but also because the Chongqing government moved in and took over. He pointed out: “It was a matter of competing sovereignties – I would like to see it more like that than just Japanese imperialism.”)
3. Collaboration is an intimate part of Chinese history: Brook pointed out that there was not an orthodox transmission from the Qing dynasty to the Republic of China to the PRC. Rather that was one of many lines of transmission during the twentieth century. To leave out the wartime experience of people who were part of collaboration regimes “is simply to reaffirm the political justifications of the People’s Republic of China for taking power in 1949,” Brook said.
In pursuit of historical disinterestedness, Brook said he particularly urged scholars to avoid use of the word ‘wei’ (or puppet/bogus) when describing this kind of regime. The Nanjing government called Chiang Kaishek’s government ‘wei’ and vice versa. Brook said the word implied a moral category, not a historical category. “I would urge thinking historically about the Chinese past, and give up thinking morally about it,” he suggested.
Comments:
Tianshi Yang praised Brook’s paper for undertaking a study of the Republic of China Reformed Government set up by Liang Hongzhi in 1938. He noted that while it was one of two successive puppet regimes in the middle/lower Yangtze region between 1938-45, research by both Chinese and foreign scholars has tended to focus on its successor, the Nanjing National Government formed in March 1940 by Wang Jingwei. Brook filled up a gap in the study of the history of modern China, Yang noted.
He also said he agreed with Brook that a differentiation must be made between moral criticism and historical study. Historians can’t not study these regimes just because they were puppet regimes. They constitute a historical fact and should be part of the study of the history of modern China.
Nonetheless, Yang took issue with the word ‘collaboration’. He noted that Brook had made a lot of accurate observations in his paper – such as that the Reformed Government was entirely a creation of the Japanese army, that it was designed, planned and controlled by the Japanese and that it disappeared into thin air after the Japanese military left.
In terms of Chinese people who formed the government these included:
· opportunists
· conservatives/retrogressive forces (who stick to backward, out-of-date ideas)
· people who fell out of favor in the government of Chiang Kaishek.
In short, the reformed government lacked any of the legality that a regime should have.
But the term ‘collaborationist regime,’ (and in his paper Brook also said that the Reformed Government cannot be simply characterized as either Japanese or Chinese), contradicted Brook’s previous points about the nature of the Reformed Government. If it was a creation of the Japanese military and controlled and supervised by them, then the Reformed Government couldn’t really be called a collaborative regime. Yang argued that the word collaboration implied that the two parties involved were on an equal footing – while the Chinese who participated in the government didn’t have their own independent will.
He noted that when Chinese scholars call it a ‘bogus’ regime, it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist—it did—it just means it didn’t express the will of the Chinese people. It was entirely established by Japanese design. And the regime was not recognized by most countries in the world, Yang said. Calling it bogus or a puppet regime is something that accords with the historical facts, he concluded.
Yuichi Kanemaru,
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
“Cultural Policies and Rule of Occupied China.”
Kanemaru raised his concerns about the accuracy of some Chinese studies of the war of resistance against the Japanese. He noted that when Japan invaded China in the 1930’s and 1940’s, it wreaked an enormous amount of damage – but that in covering this reality, he had found a lot of mistakes in the work of Chinese scholars.
Kanemaru suggested this was a problem because even if the actual mistakes are trivial, they open the door to attacks by right-wing groups in Japan. In order to avoid this, it is important for historians to be as accurate as possible, he said.
One of the focuses of the paper is the work of the ‘Committee for Requisitioning Books and Materials in Occupied Areas,’ established on December 8, 1938, just before the Rape of Nanjing.
At that time what the Japanese Army did was an unmistakable truth, Kanemaru said. But he took issue with the work of Zhao Jianming of Fudan University about what the Japanese were doing on the cultural front.
Zhao argues that:
· Japan looted books and cultural properties systematically.
· Japan trained many spies and commanded them to carry out looting.
· Japan carted some 800,000 books back to Japan.
The goal of such works is to emphasize the cruelty and uncultured nature of Japan, Kanemaru said, and noted that he had found several of Zhao’s claims “counterfeit.”
Kanemaru devoted a section of his paper to the difference between ‘loss’ and ‘looting’ – and particularly took issue with Zhao’s claim that Japan systematically took 800,000 books back to Japan to be used in domestic libraries. He notes this would have been logistically extremely difficult – a total weight of some 400,000 kilograms.
Though Kanemaru’s paper does not deny the Japanese took Chinese books, he outlines the Japanese concerns that lay behind the establishment of the Committee. He suggests the Committee inspected and collected books and sorted through them – and that its efforts actually saved many books from breakage. While the Japanese kept all military texts, many books were also returned to China in 1941, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Nanjing National Government.
Comments:
Keith Schoppa noted that the paper challenged us to see Japanese cultural policy in China in a new light.
It painted a picture of Japanese people working not only to provide important information to their military patrons – but of Japanese sincerely concerned for protecting Chinese cultural treasures and books from random looting and destruction. It showed a military leadership worried about the looting and the considerable evidence of loss of discipline among Japanese soldiers. The paper showed the determination of men like Shinjö Shinzö to preserve the original purpose of the Shanghai Natural Sciences Research Center – in the face of military pressure to alter its purpose. It showed scholars working tirelessly, conscientiously and without apparent anti-Chinese animus to carry out their mission.
This “provides us with a complex and hence more realistic face of the Japanese occupation of China,” he noted, adding that it made it impossible to see the struggle in China as “one between two monolithic forces: China and Japan.”
Schoppa notes that Kanemaru’s analysis seems to consist of:
· That rather than stealing books, the Japanese were primarily saving and protecting Chinese books and cultural treasures.
· The effort of gathering and sorting Chinese materials was carried out by scientists and social scientists in an objective manner.
· The Japanese borrowed books that they needed for intelligently developing China. The translators and editors produced many catalogues, books and journals with information that would be useful in ruling China. Then the books were returned – some of them at least.
· Japanese cultural policies were benefit oriented – they benefited the Chinese (and the preservation of Chinese cultural treasures and books) and they benefited the Japanese (by providing them with a body of knowledge about the Chinese polity and geographic regions that would be helpful in control and development of central China).
Questions/comments about this analysis:
Schoppa noted that during the conference context had been emphasized in trying to deal with differences in interpretation. But in this case semantics and empirical evidence emerged as crucial as well.
· With regards to the Chinese claim that the Japanese looting was planned and organized: Kanemaru finds this ridiculous. But could it not be that this is an issue of semantics grounded in mutual resentment and distrust? Kanemaru and Zhao are clearly describing the same events. That is, perhaps what Zhao calls looting Kanemaru calls collecting (which was the second stage of work of the Committee). If Zhao’s looting describes Kanemaru’s collecting, then it does make sense to say that it was organized.
· Kanemaru’s reluctance to use the word ‘looting’ seems somewhat inconsistent. For example, Kanemaru points out that individuals working on the book project dismissed the idea that they should build a library for the books – because the West might see the Japanese as cultural aggressors, stocking their libraries with ‘spoils of war.’ But the English dictionary defines ‘loot’ specifically as ‘spoils of war.’ Also, Kanemaru’s assertion that ‘collecting’ continued during the war leaves the looting claim open. For example, he notes that in 1939 the 11th Army took 20,000 books from libraries and from the homes of important officials in Lushan.
· The ultimate fate of the books. Some were given to the Wang Jingwei government. But what about the rest? How many books and cultural treasures went to Japan and were never returned? This is the heart of the question of looting, and in understanding, ultimately, what the meaning of ‘collecting’ was. Is this an answerable question? Are sources extant that would give us definitive answers? Japanese library acquisition records could provide at least a partial answer (though it would not include books that were lost and destroyed). But until there is more empirical evidence, “we’re left with word games played mostly defensively by both sides,” Schoppa said.
A few other issues:
· The degree of independence of the scholars and academics in deciding which books to gather, and especially which to translate and catalogue. Kanemaru says that the army was in charge of the project, but tries to downplay this by stressing that the civilians were really in charge. But it is clear that the head of the Special Services Division and the Kôa-in were in charge – except for the three months in 1938 when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took over. The other concern is the likelihood that scholars and academics could enter this project objectively. This may have been possible. But Kanemaru does not probe the possibility that there may have been less than complete objectivity. Note his enigmatic sentence on the “complicated feelings of the Japanese researchers.” I’d like to see more discussion of this point.
· The immense range of the work of translation and editing is clear – but do we know who read and used these materials and the extent to which any of this information was put to substantial use? Kanemaru notes the military retained a privileged hold on the materials after some were returned, and that after July 1942 they were made available to the public in a library and museum. This is very vague. Where were they? Who managed them? Who saw the materials? Were they indeed open to the public? This is a request for more information!
In conclusion Schoppa said that what in the end would get Chinese and Japanese researchers past chauvinistic and defensive reactions to what occurred between 1937-45 was a recognition that the war on each side was a complex and messy business cast in shades not of black or white but of gray. In the past that’s been fairly easy to see on the Chinese side, with its resistors and collaborators, warlords and Nationalists and Communists. Kanemaru showed that complexity in conceptualizing the Japanese face of war is an equally important reality, Schoppa said.
Comments/Questions from the floor:
US: [Commenting on Brook’s paper and Yang’s comments on it]: One way to put this history into the broader context of 20th century Chinese history is to recognize the larger problem of political legitimacy in post-imperial China. Since the early days of the Republic, political struggle in China hasn’t taken place through elections or parliaments – but rather through the mobilization of force and by discrediting the legitimacy of existing governments: even to the point of inviting in foreign powers to help in these political struggles.
For example, Sun Yatsen in 1917 negotiated with the Germans for a German invasion of North China to get rid of the Beiyang government. Later on he turned to the Russians. The British even went so far as to see Sun Yatsen as a stooge of Moscow.
The first CCP meeting was convened by a Russian – and without any Soviet Union there would have been no Communist Party of China. And the enemies of Communist China after 1950—the US, Taiwan—would see the PRC in its first decade as a…puppet regime.
Equally, the CCP set up its own separate regimes in Jiangxi and Yenan, undermining the legitimacy of what was then—after 1927—the internationally recognized government of Nanjing. That Nationalist government itself, during the wartime period, became a regional government and it also had foreign military help of a substantial nature.
All that said I agree with Yang that we’re talking here about a different level of dependency on the part of Wang Jingwei and some of the other regional regimes. They were more dependent – though I do prefer Brook’s term collaborationist because there was a military occupation, it was not just foreign assistance that was invited in.
The fundamental question is: how does one tell the difference? How does one tell who has the support of the people? What is the will of the people? That’s difficult to tell when the largest and fairest election ever to be held in the Chinese Mainland took place in the very first year of the Republic.
US [on Brook’s paper]:
· I have a question/problem with regards to the conclusion. It seems to emphasize the sense of normalcy, the people of central China pursuing livelihoods, paying taxes just as they had done before. But earlier in the paper the point is made that the ‘shame is not purely retrospective.’ I assume this refers to the sense of shame felt on the part of a significant portion of Chinese. So the question is to what extent is the mental world part of the experience that has to be taken into account by historians – instead of just focusing on behavior like collecting taxes etc.?
· Also, with regards to how this occupation state fits into Chinese history and the extent to which the PRC can be considered a kind of occupation state. It’s true the PRC may not have been interested in the genuine reconstruction of the country’s modest civil society. But in terms of the level of popular support, in the early years of the PRC, for social transformation—at least among the working class and the lower strata of the urban bourgeoisie—it was probably greater than you would have found in the Chinese population living under the occupation state during wartime.
[With regards to Kanemaru’s paper]:
· On the issue of whether it would have been logistically possible to ship the 800,000 books back to Japan (because this raises the issue of whether this was indeed done in a systematic and organized fashion rather than, as Kanemaru suggests, by individuals and small groups.) I’m inclined to believe that in the case of the Nanjing/Shanghai area, Kanemaru may well be right. But I was in Tokyo doing research in 1995 in the basement storage area of a certain university and I came across books and even archival materials taken from China, from the Southwest, Yunnan. It even included the diplomatic files of the British Consulate.
· Kanemaru perhaps has a tendency to take Japanese policy statements at face value. For example, the paper included comments from the diary of the notorious general Nakajima Kesago – which was used to indicate that Japanese officers cautioned against looting. But there is rather solid evidence that this person himself had engaged in a large amount of looting and taking things back to Japan – incurring criticism from his superiors.
Japan:
· [Question to Brook on the Reformed Government] What about the fiscal side of the government? What did the Japanese army appropriate and how much was from the actual Chinese? What happened to the revenue from selling opium? When a regime comes into place, you do need the fiscal side that supports it. And how was that transferred to the Wang regime?
· Also, for areas under Japanese rule, towards the end of 1938 onwards in Chinese newspapers there was talk of how the situation was stable and there were even improvements. For instance public services, infrastructure such as the water system, improved. From the point of view of historians, in terms of the chaos/aggravation of the situation from 1937 onwards, the biggest element was the Japanese army.
China: Brook made the point that the Reformed Government is a part of Chinese history, that it deserves study and this is a correct judgment. There are Chinese scholars, present here, who have studied various of the ‘bogus’ regimes like Manzhouguo. The role played by the Reformed Government was relatively minor by comparison, so there has been less time devoted to studying it.
But I want to echo some of the comments made by Yang and Mackinnon’s view that some of the terms and concepts Brook uses in the paper are not very prudent. For instance, the question of a ‘puppet regime.’ Note yesterday’s comment by Wei Hongyun: he said that he was born and brought up in Northeast China but didn’t know that Manzhouguo was a puppet regime because all the decision-making was in the hands of the Japanese military. His remarks make the whole issue very clear.
Also Brook’s description of China at that time as being made up of several regimes, even several countries. That really surprised me – that a regime is tantamount to a country. During the civil war in the US, I have never read anything written by any American scholar about two countries.
As for the Japanese invaders establishing the Reformed Government from the bottom up. It’s not that the Japanese established a county government and then a provincial government all the way up to the national level – it was not the case. It’s not as if the Shanghai government established by the Japanese [he goes into detail on how the mayor of Shanghai under the Japanese was a gangster – and not even a major one: the population of Shanghai didn’t even know who he was when he became mayor] and others like it selected the national government under Liang Hongzhi.
US: Both papers plus the comments are very challenging because they force us to rethink not just basic issues of the Sino-Japanese war but also the nature of the history project and what we do as historians.
[Focusing comments on Brook’s paper] I wonder if there isn’t a basic ambiguity in what Brook says, and whether he hasn’t quite made up his mind. On the one hand, he says it’s not the historian’s job to make moral judgements. But the paper itself has a very nuanced sentence that addresses that issue on page five: “Actual practice is the ground onto which historians need to move the legitimacy problem, for whatever moral issue it may express, legitimacy was a practical problem.”
I hear moral terms lurking in the background of this – at least the notion that the historian’s job is to make judgments about historical praxis.
We need to move the question to not simply who participates in the government (and whether they do it under duress or otherwise) but to evaluate the overall impact of the events that we’re looking at. We need to locate it in the larger context—that’s been a little bit missing in the discussion so far—of the entire Sino-Japanese war. Arguably 10 to 20 million Chinese lost their lives in that war, China was looted and subjected to enormous violence over a 15-year period. Ultimately historians have to make judgments about regimes and make an assessment of the entire history of the war.
The first comment from the floor put the issue in the context of Chinese history. I suggest we broaden that and look at the larger context of colonial and anti-colonial resistance – as a central element of 19th and 20th century history. That would provide a framework against which we should be evaluating the regimes we’re talking about.
Brook’s is a persuasive attempt to put forward a new language to replace the language of puppet regime. Actually you put forward two languages: talking of ‘collaborationist regimes’ as well as the ‘occupation state.’ I like the term ‘occupation state’ – it takes into account the important point of Chinese collaboration but it also clarifies the (in my view more) important point about the nature of this state and the ultimate power within it. Ultimately we’re moving towards an assessment of the regime itself, and when we do the latter the picture becomes a very dark one. It doesn’t allow us to just step aside and make no political judgments, whether moral or otherwise.
Brook: [noting that he was usually accused of importing political/moral judgments into his work, and so was glad someone thought he should go back to that]. The Reformed Government was a largely corrupt, incompetent and vicious political regime. But I don’t find that so interesting – after all that is well-established and was well-established at the time. They’re unattractive groups who are unable to establish genuine legitimacy.
But my aim in the paper is to think about the period in a way that avoids prior moral categories (even if only to come back to those at the end of the project) – to try and understand the way individuals involved acted and made judgements about what they should do.
There were many things that didn’t make sense: Japanese pacification agents deeply distressed about what is going on, deeply troubled about the conduct of the Japanese army and deeply disturbed at the depravity and callousness of the Chinese they had to work with. At the same time, there were local Chinese elites coming forward who felt that China had been decisively defeated, people were starving, people were being killed, and that something needed to be done. Someone had to come forward and say ‘how are we going to find enough grain so that the 30,000 people in the refugee camp outside the city wall are going to have enough to eat and aren’t dead within a week?’
People were trying to make sense of the horrible situation they were in.
The reason why I want to suspend judgment about what is wei etc. is that as long as there is always a ‘wei’ sign on the front of the shop it’s hard to go in and really find out what is going on inside.
In the end it’s impossible not to condemn the Japanese special service department for its conduct, it’s impossible to approve of what the Chinese collaborators did. But it is possible to understand why they did these things.
Why my standpoint is different from that of Chinese or Japanese historians is that they are historians of their own national story, whereas I am a complete outsider for whom the national story is not so important.
Last point: I also prefer the term ‘occupation state.’ Collaboration state or hezuo zhengfu is not a useful term, because there is no such thing as hezuo if you think hezuo or collaboration is equal: it is never equal. The term is internally impossible – there’s always a determining power in any type of collaborative relationship.
Kanemaru: The subject I dealt with is extremely delicate. If we deal with the entire period of the eight years of the Sino-Japanese war, it is true that Japan looted books. In 1941, after the outbreak of the Pacific War, some public documents were taken back to Japan. There were about 180,000 books. That’s for sure. The issue, however, was 1938, if it was possible to do it [looting] at that time, and my answer is no, it’s not possible.
In terms of who determined what was translated – the Kôa-in liked to convey the impression that it was in charge and that image has taken root. But that was not the reality. The people involved in the Kôa-in were limited in number, but they issued thousands of reports. Where did they get people to do that? Definitely the people involved were from private sector companies and other government agencies.
I believe Japan has a responsibility to return documents taken from China. If scholars come across such documents in Japan they should notify us so we can help get them returned.
US: [Talking to Brook]: When you use the term normalcy and indifference I think maybe you didn’t use it intentionally but took it over from the Japanese sources. But they are laden terms. When you talk about indifference on the part of the villagers in North China, it may be because we haven’t done enough on resistance in the occupied areas. I would use the word ‘passive resistance’, or, even though I don’t agree with James Scott in this case, I would use his term ‘everyday resistance’ or ‘weapons of the weak’ in the occupied areas. It also affects the question of political legitimacy, the question of the degree of political support. Whether it’s passive support or resistance – I still don’t think it’s indifference.
A side issue is ‘occupation state’ as opposed to ‘colonial state.’ We should define those, basing definitions on the degree of stability, the degree of acceptance of the people there – we do see a difference between Taiwan and Manchuria and North China and Central China.
China: Calls Kanemaru’s paper very provocative. The issue it focuses on—whether there was looting—the answer is certainly affirmative. Some of the facts that the paper presents are somewhat biased and don’t reflect the whole historical picture. During the war there was a secret order given by the Japanese military to all its divisions to collect Chinese cultural properties. The army may call it collecting but from the Chinese point of view it was looting.
Taiwan: [studies Wang Jingwei] With regards to Brook’s paper it may be helpful to know that when the Reformed Government came to an end they put out a complete set of materials on their own government – from its inception to its dissolution (gives citation).
In terms of how you look at the Wang Jingwei government in a scholarly context: there could be endless controversies about that. Whether you call it bogus regime or puppet regime etc. – it seems unlikely we’ll come to a definitive conclusion today: everybody is going to have his or her own opinion.
People had different feelings about the Wang Jingwei government and it’s worth looking at its complexity. How we look at it still needs further investigation. What is important is the need to interview people who lived in the occupied areas. Before Wang Jingwei came but when it was already an occupied area compared to after he came, did their feelings change? What did they think?
Also, if one defines collaboration as something involving equality between the parties, then the collaboration of the Wang Jingwei government wasn’t that great. The Japanese just put him there as a front so they could use this to attack the Nationalist Government. That’s why the Japanese took eight months to recognize him, because they didn’t want to let go of the possibility of working with the Chongqing government.
After the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Wang Jingwei was trying to actively participate and help the Japanese in the war. But they disdained him because they knew he had no power – so they dragged it out until January 1943 before they finally agreed. But that was a sign of weakness. By 1943 the Japanese were already at a disadvantage in the Pacific War and it was only then that they reluctantly accepted his support. That tells you what the Japanese really thought of Wang Jingwei.
US: Reinforces Brook’s comments about the historian’s obligation to have and express a moral position: I don’t think that is the question, the question is where and how. For as long as I have had contact with Chinese historians this has often been an issue that I have debated heatedly with them. The black/white praise/blame account of history is tantamount to the closing of the shop door before people can go inside and see what’s in there. When a label or marker [like wei] is attached that is so conspicuous that it’s used at every mention of a particular individual or country or historical situation then the atmosphere gets clouded. The reader is told: this is how you’re supposed to feel. This truly gets in the way of the kind of historical exploration aimed at understanding all the complexities that we all support as a goal, but that our cultural biases make us differ in how we set about pursuing.
US: Holmes Welch told a story of a rather valuable sutra that the 8th Route Army seized from the Japanese and that was ruined after they stored it in a mine. Holmes Welch suggested that if it had been handled in another way – that if it had been taken out of the battlefield or even out of China, it would have been accessible to generations of people. Ownership—whether permanent or temporary—of cultural properties is a very emotion-laden issue.
Japan: Takes issue with a disclaimer from Brook that he is not the writer of a ‘national history’ and so can have a different agenda from Japanese or Chinese writers about the war. If Brook’s assumption is that national history takes a different standpoint, if that’s what he’s saying, then it’s very difficult to continue the discussion. History should be a common pursuit, whatever standpoint you are looking at it from.