China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: R. Keith Schoppa, Valparaiso University
Chair: David Barrett, McMaster University
Discussants: David Barrett, McMaster University; Diana Lary, University of British Columbia
The legacy of World War II still haunts the nations of East Asia. Echoes of the war make frequent front page news, as in January 1997 when statements by a Japanese chief cabinet secretary on the comfort-women issue cast a shadow over a summit of the President of South Korea and the Prime Minister of Japan. Yet the fight over the legacy of the war—to control historical memory—has perhaps more to do with contemporary foreign relations and internal politics than purely academic questions. As a consequence, much of the voluminous historical work on the war era remains polemical and often fails to utilize (in objective fashion) new archival resources now available or to look analytically at the processes and meaning of actual collaboration and resistance.
These papers, two focusing primarily on collaboration and two on resistance, provide such analyses. Coble’s paper on Shanghai capitalists offers a detailed study of particular collaborators and raises issues about the relationship between collaboration and resistance. Schoppa’s analysis of Hangzhou collaborationist regimes shows how various contextual changes over time affected not only the identities of collaborators but also the processes and the very meaning of collaboration. Li’s study uses the currency wars between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese to raise questions about the nature and impact of Chinese resistance to aggressive monetary warfare. Davenport points to a new understanding of Chinese resistance in Zhejiang—that its practice contributed substantially to political consolidation and state-building. We would argue that the papers reach a new level of sophistication in approaching the complexity and reality of the historical experiences of collaboration and resistance in this war.
Parks M. Coble, University of Nebraska
In this paper, I propose to revisit the actual wartime experiences of one key group involved in the war—the Shanghai area capitalists. Using newly available sources, I will examine three specific groups of businessmen—textile, rubber, and chemical industrialists—during the period 1941 to 1945. In December 1941, the Japanese occupied the foreign enclaves in Shanghai, bringing China’s most important capitalist center under Japanese control. The Japanese military extended its system of economic controls over Shanghai, while at the same time attempting to force Chinese capitalists to support publicly the Wang Jingwei regime. My paper will analyze how these three groups of capitalists responded to these events. By comparing the experiences of three different groups, their willingness to work with the Japanese, and their attempts to evade control, I hope to shed new light on the issues of collaboration/resistance.
R. Keith Schoppa, Valparaiso University
While Chinese nationalists have seen collaborators and their regimes as continuously and uniformly traitorous, collaborators and collaborating regimes are not static nor do they necessarily exhibit moral or immoral behavior. The composition of such regimes and the motives and reactions of their leaders vary over time; indeed the very meaning of collaboration may differ according to time and place.
This paper explores the collaborationist regimes in Hangzhou from the city’s takeover and establishment of Peace Preservation Societies through the formal government structures functioning under the Nanjing regime. Its primary concerns are the changing identities of collaborators, from the early domination of the regimes by capitalist entrepreneurs to a more diverse leadership, and the processes of change in the collaborationist regime. Both identity and process are best analyzed by realities of context; in the case of Hangzhou such realities include military conquest, especially the Japanese seizures of Shaoxing and Ningbo in 1941 and of Jinhua and the Qiantang valley in 1942; the particular nature of the Japanese military leaders in Hangzhou; relations with Shanghai and with the Nanjing regime; economic pressures; and the potential for anti-regime violence (realized in the assassination of one provincial governor). This analysis will thus deal with the complex realities of a collaborationist regime and contribute to our understanding of the nature of such regimes.
Lincoln Li, Monash University
A key foundation of Nationalist Chinese power was monetary power built by the Central Bank after 1934; the bank had exclusive power to issue notes, the credit worthiness of which was established in the Shanghai money market. Initial confrontation came with the currency issued by the Central Bank of Manzhouguo.
After 1937, Japanese control over the lower Yangzi economy was partial. The continued acceptance of Chinese notes as legal tender became a test of continued Nationalist Chinese power and influence over economic resources in Japanese-occupied lower Yangzi areas. The Japanese conceived of the currency war to erode and destroy the role of money issued by the Chinese government; this in turn necessitated Chinese resistance in order to maintain an international exchange value for Chinese notes in Shanghai.
This paper deals with concrete "battles" in the monetary wars to understand the dynamics of the situation. In the end, it raises questions about how both sides were practicing predatory measures upon the general economy—leading to sustained inflation and to decline in food, silk, and cash crop production and in manufacturing output.
F. Garvin Davenport, University of Illinois
Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937 shattered the Nationalists’ many recent achievements in building a modern state. In Zhejiang, however, the war provided new opportunities, allowing the regime to continue its state-building efforts. This continued progress warrants a re-evaluation of the Nationalists’ program of state-building, the role of the eight-year war with Japan, and the regime’s contributions toward building modern China.
The Japanese invasion and occupation disrupted and weakened many local political power structures. Central government authorities turned this weakness into an opportunity. I argue that the regime’s anti-Japanese resistance movement worked to penetrate further local political structures as it attempted to contain the Japanese and their puppet’s ambitions in the province. I focus on how the process of re-establishing and expanding government and political administrative units after the invasion worked to weaken and remove local power holders. This process allowed the authorities to screen candidates for local posts. Training was required to further insure that these officials would follow GMD directives. These efforts reveal that the regime continued to consolidate its political hold on the province as it fought the Japanese occupation. The war, therefore, helped both the GMD’s state-building efforts in Zhejiang and the struggle to unify China into a modern nation.