INTRODUCTION 3 INTRODUCTION those outside,helped sharpen the defined boundaries of that commu- and a more recently developed nationalistic consciousness."38 But in the nity;and over the centuries China faced repeated crises that would make case of China,he suggests,the rejection of traditional culture by the na- those definitions ever clearer. tionalistic elite meant that modern nationalism was robbed of cultural However,common identification is not merely an elite phenome- resonance.Lucian Pye,agreeing that Chinese nationalism is weak,sug- non.Anthropology has made highly significant contributions in recent gests that the "primordial(ethnic,linguistic,and cultural)values of years to the idea that there is a long-standing concept of"Chineseness China are so strong that they actually block "the formation of a distinct based on culture and community.Myron Cohen states,"Embedded in sense of modern nationalism.39 These analyses allow a great deal of China's late traditional culture [i.e.,that of the Qing era]was a repre- overlap between cultural community and nation and are an attractive sentation of that country's social and political arrangements so strongly way of approaching the issue,avoiding the unnecessary"either/or"di- developed as to convey to the Chinese people a quite firm sense of their chotomy of those who demand that a modern identitys exclude and involvement in them."He suggests that continuing"diffusion and ac- supersede all premodern ones.40 culturation"led to a Han dominance that standardized Chinese culture; However,political elites did repeatedly choose nationalism rather times when the state was strong provided a"security umbrella"for more than cultural identity as the means to empower themselves during the Han migration,whereas times when it was weak led to chaos and more crises of the late Qing and throughout the Republic.This was not in it- refugee migration.For Cohen,rituals,which filter down to local levels, self a sign that the premodern conceptions of collective identification are the cement that create a national consciousness:"Rituals firmly had been rejected or that the modern ones associated with nationalism linked China's common people to a national culture through their emu- were not reinterpreted and adapted by the Chinese who used them;in lation of local elites."Cohen builds on the work of James L.Watson, this context Prasenjit Duara has proposed a fruitful concept of the"East who suggests that images of the "Jade Emperor and his bureaucracy" Asian modern,"suggesting that thinkers such as Kang Youwei could use were relatively standardized throughout China,and that this standard- the terminology of the modern project imported into China within the ization was encouraged by the state.35 wider parameters of the Confucian paradigm.1 Nor was the rejection Prasenjit Duara adds a cautionary note on this topic:while the cul- of tradition,often stated as having occurred during the May Fourth ture itself may have been standardized,he suggests that symbols within Movement,absolute.My analysis in chapter 6 will suggest that Man- it,such as Guandi,the God of War,had different meanings for different churian propagandists in exile in Beiping were nationalists,yet used strata of society.The flexibility of Guandi's symbolism meant that he thinking that had come from the indigenous Chinese tradition com- was"probably the most popular god worshiped in the villages of North bined with ideas imported and adapted from abroad.Yan Baohang and China."36 The Han immigrants to Manchuria from North China were Wang Zhuoran,future leaders of the NNSS,had studied at Beijing mostly from Hebei and Shandong,and even though they might have University,heart of the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement,as well as come to the region as exiles,they still erected temples to the same be- abroad.Yet their language is also reminiscent of Yan Fu,Liang Qichao, liefs.37 Qing official participation also took place,as in North China, members of the National Essence (gitocui)School,and other thinkers and the military governor participated in annual worship at the temple who aimed not to reject traditional Chinese culture but to adapt it. of Guandi as well as the altars of the Gods of Soil and Grains(Shejitan) Their commitment to nationalism was in no way incompatible with and the God of Agriculture (Xiannongtan).This connection with a their other identities;in fact,they meshed seamlessly.But it must be re- wider community grew through the late nineteenth century and early membered that the idea of nationalism was a foreign one.Whether it twentieth,particularly during the massive immigration from North was Yan Fu adapting the ideas of Herbert Spencer,or Liang Qichao China in the I9zos.Thus awareness of a cultural community existed adapting Meiji political texts that had in turn come from Europe,the alongside the alicnation from that community that had made the mi- concept that there existed a world system of nation states,national con- grants come to the Northeast in the first place. sciousness,and national identity that claimed to command overarching Cohen sees "no necessary contradiction between a consciousness of loyalty was imported,even though these ideas took root within the con- national identification grounded in an elaborate cultural construction text of the preexisting Chinese concept of a wider cultural community
g INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Those who had power to attack China,observed the Qing thinkers,de- the way national identity was used for very practical and tangible politi- rived their strength from their unity as nations,and China should like- cal purposes;and showing how that was done is the core of the book. wise reconstitute its polity in that form.It was this clite form of nation- alist discourse(which Sun Yatsen,for one,analyzed in great detail)that JAPANESE IMPERIALISM RECONSIDERED national political activists worked with,and that the NNSS followed in its turn. It is surely not an act of glossing over the very real atroci- Furthermore,political and urban circles responded to nationalist lan- ties that took place during the period of the Japanese wartime empire, guage for a number of reasons.The spread of journalism and new the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,to question how useful it schools that looked for fresh texts after the abolition of the examination is to regard Japanese imperialism through the whole 193I to 1945 period system in I9os was a factor in its growth;Liang Qichao in particular as being homogeneous in nature and monolithic in practice.The recog- popularized the new terms.42 Not everyone who read newspapers using nition of regional variations in the nature of Japanese imperialism allows this language was necessarily ready to respond to it,but no reader us to make judgments about the nature of individual colonial experi- would be unaware of it.Literate readers might or might not respond to ences.This follows the lead of researchers in other aspects of modern an appeal to them as members of the nation,but they would certainly Chinese history,where the importance of recognizing regional diversity have an understanding of the term.43 Education and military service has informed much new research on the nature of the Chinese Commu- were other factors opening up horizons:many of the nationalist activists nists,for example.44 in Shenyang who later joined the NNSS went to college,some outside Japanese imperialist encroachment was essentially disjointed,and few the Northeast and even abroad,and many soldiers,whether officers or now subscribe to aconspiracy theoryanalysis of Japanese imperialism. not,served in campaigns as far off as Fujian. Instead,the expansion of Japanese power is explained by a combination In summary,although there were long-standing,premodern Chinese of power-group conflicts and logrolling by power cartels.45 To consider collective identifications,the use of the concepts nation and nationalisi the Manchurian occupation as being simply one fourteen-year-long emerged only in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.This orgy of destruction is misleading.As a comparison,one may consider study will suggest that in the r93os,nationalist activists chose to use this studies on Japanese rule in Korea and Taiwan.E.Patricia Tsurumi and particular form of political identity because it best suited their purposes, Michael Robinson's studies of education and publication policy in colo- and they adapted it freely when they needed to;they were not in thrall nial Taiwan and Korea,respectively,demonstrate considerable variation to the idea of the nation as a predefined package,which they had to take in Japanese policy,both chronologically and socially.46 In Taiwan,the or leave in its entirety.The NNSS in particular set up a series of power- colonial administration took care to co-opt enough of the local elites to ful tropes of resistance to Japan that were spread through the apparatus ensure that their rule went smoothly,and in 1945,at the end of the pe- of national ideology;these tropes were not all-pervasive,since they fell riod of Japanese rule,there was far less resentment than in Korea.Even at many of the hurdles that the modern project encountered elsewhere in Korea,the Japanese annexation was finessed with the help of a collab- in early-twentieth-century China,yet they set down markers that would orationist party in the Korean Diet (and a collaborationist militia,the ultimately prove to be of great and lasting power.Additionally,just as Ilchinhoe,which became almost embarrassing in its enthusiasm to sub- premodern identity in the form of rituals was often defined at the elite mit Korea to Japanese rule).47 What these examples indicate is that even level but reappropriated when it reached the grass roots,so national where the colonial experience was brutal,harsh,and oppressive,Japa- identity,once out of the grasp of the nationalist elite,emerged at the nese control did not tend to rely for long-term control on military force popular level looking similar to its elite form in some ways,and very alone.Stationing large numbers of troops and carrying out coercion different in others.Which leads to the final point:to some extent it does primarily by force was costly and ineffective;it was much easier to not matter all that much whether the identity described in this book is co-opt local collaborators.Naturally,rational economic considerations nationalist or not,although I believe that it is.To be nationalist is not, are not the only incentives to empire.But the Rape of Nanjing and after all,a question of merit or morality.What is interesting,rather,is the "Three Alls"policy (two of the most notorious atrocities of the
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Sino-Japanese War)were not the actions of an economically rational im- cance transcended by far the sum of its active parts(the small groups of perialist,and it is worth noting that it was in China south of the Wall gucrrilla partisans who did the actual fighting)"as well as"the identifi- that anti-Japanese resistance arose as a mass phenomenon-and not in cation of this Resistance'with the nation as a whole"s Chapters s and 6 Manchuria,where imperialism was longer lasting but relatively more will deal with the resistancialist phenomenon in 193os China in detail. collaborative,at least in its initial phase. Having asserted that the Japanese managed to obtain collaborative The role of anti-imperialism as a powerful idea in twentieth-century support from the population of the Northeast,it is necessary to define China is undeniable,but as with the rise of nationalism,one must not “collaboration.”“Collaboration,”points out Anil Seal in his discussion confuse the assertion that it was powerful with the assumption that it of India under British imperial rule,"is a slippery term which may apply was therefore spontaneous or inevitable.For example,much of the evi- at any level between acquiescence and resignation"52 In his innovative dence for popular anti-imperialism in Manchuria in the rozos rests on study of intellectual choices in occupied Shanghai,Poshek Fu uses Paul popular demonstrations,but other sources also reveal that it was quite Jankowski's study of collaboration in occupied Marseille to draw a dis- common for Zhang Zuolin and other local power brokers to engineer tinction between "hard and"softcollaboration.5 I will draw addition- demonstrations to give themselves political leverage(or a way out of an ally on Ronald Robinson's "excentric"theory of collaboration as a awkward situation they chose not to deal with).49 In short,we should be- model to try and account for the phenomenon in the Northeast. ware of using anti-imperialism as a blanket explanation for nationalism. Robinson charactcrizes collaboration as a bargain"between two sides at the empire's periphery.Empire simply becomes unaffordable if RESISTANCIALISM AND COLLABORATION: the return gained is not many times higher than the investment of re- DEFINITIONS AND PRACTICE sources and personnel put into it.The theory emphasizes that it is not enough to think of the purpose and practice of empire from the metro- Resistance has become a powerful theme in China,as pole's point of view;one has to bring in the periphery as well.54 This in- elsewhere,in connection with the war,and Chang-tai Hung's magister- terpretation is now commonplace in the field of imperial history,as is ial study of popular culture during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to the idea of local collaboration as a sine qua non of imperial control.The 194s has illuminated many of the media and techniques used by propa- British Empire was the first area of concentrated study on this topic: gandists during the war to help create this discourse of resistance.50 In however,the concept is also valuable for understanding the experience popular memory,the perceptions unraveled by Hung have often been of those who encountered Japanese imperialism.55 projected backward;thus one of the most prevalent myths about theoc Some Manchurian nationalists in exile in Beiping were able to make the cupation of Manchuria is that there was widespread resistance to the distinction between different types of collaborator.56 But for the most part, Japanese occupation,led by the armed forces generally known as yiy- their resistancialist image was able to function only in terms of dichotomy; ongj(righteous armies).The collective memory of the period has it as thus collaboration was an anomaly in the face of a Chinese-Japanese con- a given that such resistance not only ran at a high level but also attracted flict.The only way to deal with the collaborators in this model was to dis- popular sympathy.Subsequent chapters of this book will deal with the miss them as being motivated by gross moral turpitude.Linguistic differ- heroic actions of many resistance fighters who undertook what must ence also masks a key point.Just as“resistance”or“volunteers'”does not have seemed to be hopeless campaigns against the Japanese invaders. quite translate the "loyal and righteous"elements ofyiyong,"collabora- But I will also show that the levels of resistance and support for the re- tor"does not carry the full force of hanjin,the standard term used by the sistance before the outbreak of total war have been exaggerated in pop- resistancialists to refer to those who cooperated with the Japanese,and ular memory.This type of misperception about the nature of resistance which has overtones not just of treachery but suggests"a person so irre- during wartime is not exclusive to China,and I will follow the example deemably subhuman as to forfeit all claims of being Chinese.57 But how of historians of modern France by referring to it as "resistancialism." well does this dismissive language explain the activities of collaborators? Henry Rousso,in defining his use of the term,states that it includes"the In constructing a resistancialism that sets up China in opposition to construction of an object of memory,the Resistance,whose signifi- Japan and thereby necessarily posits Japan as Other,the propagandists
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 9 had to erase memories of the multiple examples of previous Chinese in- which the Chinese imperial institution rested (cheng)and that teraction with the Japanese.Yuan Shikai,for one,used Japanese help in they bring all the Chinesc under one unified rule (tg)."58 During the setting up a police force,and Sun Yatsen let the Japanese know that he early Qing,the Kangxi emperor expended great effort to incorporate might be willing to grant them concessions beyond even what was re- himself into the dominant culture,issuing a sixteen-point Sacred Edict quired by the Twenty-one Demands(the harsh demands Japan made of in 167o that legitimized his rule in Confucian terms.59 The ruling dynas- China in Iors)if they would support him in his bid for power,although ties in these cases ending up taking on many aspects of the Chinese cul- he would not necessarily have fulfilled this promise.The new nationalist ture they had conquered,even while maintaining their own distinct eth- narrative,fueled by a starkly dichotomized resistancialism,had to oblit- nic identities;while this did not happen to the Japanese in occupied erate these anomalies,but they continued to exist. Manchuria in the r93os,the structures of government they set up owed Why should the Manchurians collaborate with the Japanese?First,it a great deal to traditional Chinese governance,which would in turn is important to make a distinction between "fifth columnism"and even smooth the process of legitimizing cooperation by clites active collaboration.To take a well-known European example,the Nazis One danger of overreliance on the excentric model of collaboration is in the Sudetenland acted as a fifth column in Czechoslovakia in the that it tends to reduce empire to an exercise in rational choice theory and 193os,actively agitating for the assimilation of the region into the Ger- excludes both its more economically irrational aspects,visible in Ishi- man Reich.In Korea,the Ilchinhoe played this role with regard to the wara Kanji's pan-Asianist plans,and the occasions where it is politically Japanese empire.In contrast,there seems to have been no such activity or indeed humanly irrational,such as the Rape of Nanjing.However, in France before 1940,even on the part of French fascist organizations Ronald Robinson's wide-ranging and self-declared nonpejorative defin- such as the Croix de Feu;however,once the German occupation was a ition of collaborators as rational actors in the dynamics of empire is fait accompli,there was an enthusiastic clique of French politicians who highly useful.That definition includes the many Chinese who took jobs sought active collaboration with the Germans for their so-called Na- with companies in Manchuria run by the South Manchurian Railway, tional Revolution.Despite decades of local Chinese collaboration with thereby accepting the collaborative"bargain"of higher wages and better Japanese dominance in the Northeast before 1931,the Manchurian case working conditions than were available in North China.60 seems to belong to the French rather than the Czech type.The These models of nationalism,resistance,imperialism,and collaboration Manchurian Incident was planned and executed within the framework pose the danger of drawingus into neat,packaged conclusions based more of the Kwantung Army,without even authorization from the govern- on theory than on evidence.This study stresses at all times that it was ment in Tokyo,let alone Chinese involvement.However,once the coup people,whether individuals or groups,who made decisions and affected had happened,the dynamics of domestic Manchurian politics meant the course of events.This in turn makes another warning necessary.We will that the Japanese were able to find collaborators for their new state"in go on to look beneath the surface of myths of national resistance in China, the Northeast. and we know enough about the importance of war to national identity in Traditional Chinese thought contributed to sanctioning elite collabo- many societies not to be surprised at the bare fact that the rhetoric of resis- ration with outsiders.Although the Confucian worldview had a strong tance was not a literal reporting of what happened on the ground.There is tradition of loyalty and refusal to serve unjust rulers,it also gave high a danger,however,of taking that point one step too far and cynically con- priority to management of society,even when the ruling political au- cluding thatn of the story of Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism thority was far from ideal.This ethic had operated during previous peri- has any real basis.That would be a profound misreading of the evidence ods of foreign rule,in particular the Mongol and Manchu periods.Ac- presented here.This book deals with people faced with difficult,often in- cording to Frederick W.Mote,for the majority of Chinese elites under tolerable choiccs,and who often resisted invasion against insuperable the Yuan dynasty,"Chinese civilization knew only one criterion for le- odds.The rhetoric that surrounded the resistance fighters was constructed, gitimating a new dynasty,and the Mongols could be seen as meeting but that docs not make the feelings of national pride and purpose that they that test.The Mandate of Heaven theory did not demand that China's inspired any less genuine or heartfelt.Let us turn to their stories. rulers be Chinese,only that they accepted the conceptual framework on
REFORM AND REACTION 2 annexed area known as the Kwantung (Guandong)Leased Zone and a much larger region where it exercised informal imperialism through the South Manchurian Railway Company.A garrison,known as the Kwan- tung Army,was assigned to the region to protect Japanese interests there. Manchuria also became a site of political experimentation during the CHAPTER 2 late Qing.In 1906,the imperial commission headed by the prominent officials Xu Shichang and Zaizhen toured the region and then advocated Reform and Reaction a whole serics of reforms,including strengthened defenses against Japan and Russia,the establishment of civil authority in Jilin,and the im- Northeast China under Zhang Xueliang, provement of regional finances and policing.The establishment of I028-I93I provincial assemblies followed shortly afterward.2 However,there was still a division,here as elsewhere in China,between the spheres of influ- ence of the provincial assemblies and the local councils whose role inter- sected with that of the senior bodies only rarely,if at all.3 The efforts at reform proved insufficient to save the imperial system. In the period immediately following the ron revolution,the main The Northeast of China has been known since the mid- power brokers in the region,such as Governor-Gencral Zhao Erxun, seventeenth century as the Three Eastern Provinces"(Dongsansheng: stayed in power.Only in the following years did the jostling for influ- Fengtian,renamed Liaoning between 1929 and 193r;Jilin;and Hei- ence in the region grow,with the result that Zhang Zuolin,a militarist longjiang).It is a grim place,today marked by gray industrial landscapes, from Fengtian province,rose to become the ruler of the Three Eastern separated by stretches of stark plains and mountains,but in earlier cen- Provinces,and for a time much of North China.During the ten years turies it was even more of a wilderness.The homeland of the Manchus, that he was in power(1918-28),Zhang launched a series of military cam- whose Qing dynasty conquered China in the seventeenth century,the paigns,all ultimately unsuccessful,aimed at installing himself as ruler of Northeast was,from the mid-seventeenth century until the late eigh- the whole of China.His military expenses left the region with a huge fis- teenth century,supposed to be off-limits to the Han Chinese.Yet in prac- cal deficit.Civilian elites in the region were unhappy at the way in which tice this regulation was often broken,and by the middle of the eighteenth Zhang raised taxes and overrode their newly constituted assemblies,and century,political exiles and those who had been victims of economic cir- even some of his military subordinates,notably Guo Songling in 1925, cumstances or natural disasters were regularly crossing the "willow pal- attempted to overthrow him.That Zhang survived was due in large part isades"into the region.As the Qing declined and the threat from the im- to his being sponsored by Japan,which provided him with both money perialist powers grew,the government in Beijing changed its policy and and advisers.In the end,Zhang showed signs of rebellion against Japan, encouraged settlers to go to the Northeast and settle in untouched terri- and renegade Japanese officers assassinated him with a bomb on a train tory before the Russians extended their influence into the area.The great on 4 June 1928.4 Zhang Zuolin was succeeded by his son Zhang power conflict,however,was not so easily avoided.In the late nineteenth Xucliang.The younger Zhang had to deal with a multitude of problems, century,the Qing were forced to grant Russia railway and territorial con- political,social,and cconomic,and his efforts were interrupted after cessions in the southern part of the region;Japanese fears of Russian ex- only three years by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria,which began pansion in the Pacific led to a war between the two nations in 19o4-05, on I8 September 1931.This chapter aims to explain the background to which ended in a victory for the Japanese that shocked not only Russia that occupation,including the various clite strata in the region,with but all thosc in the West who assumed that an Asian power must in- whom Zhang Xueliang had to deal,the significance of local banditry,re- evitably lose to a European one.Japan took over the rights that Russia lations between Zhang and foreign powers,negotiations between had previously held,and set up a structure combining a smaller,formally Zhang and Chiang Kaishek,and finally,Zhang's efforts at reform. 20