Collaborators and Capitalists: The Politics of "Material Control" in Wartime Shanghai

Abstract

From November 1937 to August 1945, during nearly the entire period of the Second Sino-Japanese the Chinese City (huajie) of Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. After December 1941 the International Settlement and the French Concession also fell into the hands of the Japanese, ending the Sino-Western condominium of the city that had existed for nearly a century. In Shanghai, as everywhere else in occupied China, the Japanese enlisted the help of Chinese collaborators. Their dependence on that help, however, was greater in the city than in most other places. It was impossible for the limited number of Japanese troops to maintain peace and order in a metropolis of more than five million people.1 More important, mobilizing through the city the economic resources of Lower Yangtze for support of the China War, a major objective of the Japanese occupation in Shanghai, created a special need for obtaining cooperation and assistance from the city's business elite.