Wartime collaboration in question: an examination of the postwar trials of the Chinese collaborators

Abstract

This paper examines the political aspects of the postwar trials of the Chinese collaborators and their arguments, at the trials, against the charges of treason. Against the dominant scholarship on their collaboration with Japan, it argues that the Chinese collaborators had a different version of nationalism, which emphasized the different roles and functions of the state during the anti‐Japanese war, and that wartime collaboration was, in part, a product of their reflections on the Guomindang’s history and its political culture since 1927. The fates of the major collaborators, as the trial cases of Zhou Fohai and Chen Gongbo show, were determined, this paper argues, not by legal crimes they committed but rather mainly by their former political affiliations in the intraparty politics, which revealed the political character of the trials. The political aspects seemed to serve to disclose further the innate problems and inability of the party and its Nationalist Government, which were the main reasons for its ‘failure’ in 1949.