Collaboration: Japanese agents and local elites in wartime China

Abstract

Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China, by Timothy Brook. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv + 288 pp. US$18.95/£12.95/euro17.50 (paperback). Timothy Brook has produced a superb book about the vexed problem of The study of collaboration is, of course, intimately associated with the study of nationalism. Since it is nationalism that framed collaboration as a most vile moral crime, the ongoing scholarly deconstruction of nationalism has re-directed collaboration to a liminal moral zone. The absence of a viable alternative to the morality of the nation also seems to have hobbled our capacity to embark on new research directions on collaboration. Of all the studies of collaboration-or those that touch on it-in East Asian studies, Brook's provides us with the most interesting historical perspective. One of the book's great strengths is the clear and methodical way in which it proceeds through its historical investigation. Brook hews closely to his principal sources and texts, which he both utilizes and interrogates. He cross-examines Chinese and Japanese, collaborative and denunciatory, occupier and resistor texts, often with regard to the same phenomenon, if not the same event or person. Yet Brook is sufficiently a stylist that this procedure rarely lapses into a dry, judicial mode of inquiry. At the same time, the conclusions that he draws feel remarkably faithful to this methodology. Brook argues that collaboration and resistance have been treated as Manichean categories deriving from nationalist morality, which does considerable injustice to the historical record. The proper terrain of the historian is rather the complex tissue of motives, actions and results: how people intended to behave, how they actually behaved, and what consequences resulted from their behavior in the face of a ruthless occupation. The core of the book contains five case studies, all drawn from the lower Yangtze valley, and including Shanghai and Nanjing. At the local or even microlevel, we see how a single act could have unimagined repercussions, as when lower-level collaborators succeeded in derailing the entire edifice of the occupation's administrative structure; or when the guerilla forces' resistance to the occupation could subject an entire population to Japanese military recrimination. Brook also pays equal attention to the mentality of the Japanese agents who tried to recruit Chinese supporters at the lowest levels of this enterprise. We get to decide just how self-delusionary was the Mantetsu agent who saw himself fulfilling the great mission of saving China and Asia, in the face of the unimaginable horrors perpetrated by his military. At another level, the study gives us a picture of how the Japanese military and associated agencies sought to establish administrative power in central China. …