Reflection on China's Puppet Regime

 

The question of moral judgment looms large over every discussion of World War II collaboration, at times clouding and distorting our understanding of this complex issue, as Timothy Brook poignantly remarks in his contribution to this journal's recent symposium. This moral question is certainly relevant and should not be dismissed, since collaboration came to be more or less directly associated with the civic and human rights infringements perpetrated by the occupying forces.[1] Always complex, this question becomes murkier when linked to the rhetoric of patriotism and to postwar political agendas, as is the case with the “resistentialist” postwar narrative that has dominated the debate on collaboration until recently.[2] This narrative has mythologized resistance and enshrined it as the only patriotic, moral, and honorable response to foreign occupation, gliding over difficult moral dilemmas raised by some strategies and practices of resistance. In the process, it has polarized the debate on collaboration by offering only two opposite and monolithically-conceived categories: moral and patriotic resistance versus unethical and treasonous collaboration. It has therefore left no conceptual tool for gaining a more nuanced understanding of behaviors that do not fit this pre-established and rigid dichotomy, such as “nationalist” or “state-building” collaborationism—referring, respectively, to attempts at protecting nation and population from the occupying forces and at state building in the face of the complete and bewildering disappearance of the preexisting order, as in the cases discussed by Brook.[3] Finally, this resistentialist narrative has constructed a universal image of collaboration, which tends to reduce various forms of this phenomenon in different countries to a common denominator, obliterating all political, social, and cultural differences. 

 

In order to overcome this ideological impasse and gain a more accurate understanding of the circumstances of collaboration, Brook shifts our attention to the local level and to the early stages of Japanese occupation, when no centralized collaborationist government was yet in place. His intention is to set aside, what he calls “the considerations of national honor and personal integrity that haunted the metropolitan politicians.” He wants, instead, to throw light on practical problems, such as food distribution, that people faced daily under occupation and on the “state-building collaborationism” that these problems generated. Bringing to light these difficult-to-classify instances of collaboration—that fall outside of the meganarrative of postwar resistentialist patriotism—is a crucial step in gaining a more nuanced understanding of Chinese collaboration.

 
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