Wartime collaboration through a collaborator’s eyes: Zhou Fohai (1897–1947) and his diary

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the politics and ideology of collaboration in China during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression through Zhou Fohai’s diary. It suggests that his collaboration be understood as a complex wartime phenomenon that demonstrates a different version of nationalism with an aim to alleviate pains and hardships of the people during the war and with a prospect for China’s survival and development based on anti-communism and Sun Yat-sen’s Pan-Asian idea that viewed Japan as its crucial partner. Zhou’s collaboration also needs to be approached within the context of the Guomindang’s political culture and history, as he believed that organizing a separate National Government had been an acceptable political undertaking in the party with two precedents. His diary also testifies that the debacle of the Nanjing collaborationist government was not just due to its nature as a “puppet regime,” but a product of complex factors deep-seated in the party’s incorrigible culture and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Zhou Fohai
• Zhou Fohai’s diary
• wartime collaboration
• Anti-Japanese War
• collaborationist government
• Pan-Asianism
• anti-communism
• nationalism
• Guomindang

Special terms

Table

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Roxann Prazniak for reading and commenting on this paper, and to the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Notes

1 After the end of the war, Zhou’s diary was confiscated by the Juntong (Military Statistics Bureau of the National Government), but somehow part of it was leaked out to Hong Kong and published there in a volume in 1955 (Zhou 1955a), which only covered his diary to 1940. Later in 1984, it was published in China by Shanghai Social Science Academy as “internal publication,” covering Zhou’s diary from 1943 to 1945, in addition to that of 1940 from its Hong Kong version (Zhou 1984a). In 1986, under historian Cai Dejin’s editorship, Zhou’s diary from 1937 to 1945, with an omission of 1939, was published in China, this time in two volumes (Zhou 1986a). The diary under examination for the current study is this 1986 version. Two years later in 1991, Zhou’s prison diary that covers from January to September of 1947 was published also in China (GD 1991).

2 For example, Zhou wrote in his diary for 29 November 1938, that he went to Wang Jingwei’s residence at 4:00 PM, where he decided with Wang, Chen Gongbo, etc., that Wang would leave for Chengdu on 8 December 1938, and then for Kunming on 11 December 1938, and that “I [Zhou] go to Kunming first and wait” for Wang. Zhou added these to the date’s entry later on 13 December 1938 in Hong Kong after defection (Zhou 1986a, 196).

3 An example inside the GMD was Chen Bulei who, as Director of one of the sections in Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff Office, attended informal meetings of the “peace advocates” at Zhou’s residence but didn’t defect with Wang. An example outside the party was Zuo Shunsheng (1893–1969), who, according to Zhou (1986a, 35), agreed with his analysis of the general situation of the time. Although Zuo had believed that China and Japan must not and could not fight each other, because the outcome of it would be undoubtedly harmful to both countries, Zuo (1952, 59–60) switched his opinion later and didn’t join Zhou for defection, believing that he had to support resistance once it had become a national policy by the state’s decision.

4 Around that time Chen seemed to have professed that the GMD should adopt the British and American style capitalism to develop China’s national industry (Tang 1989, vol. 2, 207–208, 213).

5 The Japanese empire, since the 1930 Manchurian Incident, had been using its colonies and, at the same time, seeking “junior partners” to build its own bloc economy against the US and the British empire. Colonial Korea no doubt surfaced as its significant colony, so did colonial Taiwan and Manchukuo (and later Southeast Asian countries). Its goal was to take control of and exploit resources in the colonies and occupied areas to sustain its war efforts and incorporate them into Japan’s own bloc economy (Asada 1981).

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Dongyoun Hwang

Dongyoun Hwang is Professor of Asian Studies at Soka University of America and is a co-editor (with the late George O. Totten III) of a new edition of Song of Arirang: The Story of a Korean Revolutionary in China, by Kim San and Nym Wales (forthcoming).