9. Hanjian (Traitor)!
Collaboration and Retribution
in Wartime Shanghai
Frederic Wakeman Jr.
You young fellows must love your country and not assist the Japanese or be a traitor. Now in Nandao they are in need of a number of young plainclothes soldiers. If you wish to join us, you must follow me.SPECIAL ACTION CORPS RECRUITER, SHANGHAI, SEPTEMBER 1937
One of the most commonly used epithets in the Chinese popular press of the 1930s and early 1940s was the term hanjian, which meant "traitor" or "traitor to the Han." According to the Hanyu da cidian, the term "originally indicated the scum of the Han people [Hanzu bailei]. Later it generally came to allude to someone who throws in his or her lot with a foreign people [waizu] or with foreign invaders, willingly serves at their beck and call, and sells out the interests of the ancestral land and the people [zuguo minzu]."[1]
TRANSGRESSING BOUNDARIES
The key word, jian, exists in two forms (Mathews 817 and Mathews 818). The first form, which is a character composed of three nü (women), primarily means "private, selfish, secret" and "heterodox, depraved, vicious, evil, wicked, demonic." The ancient lexicon Shuowen derives these meanings from the notion of doting on or being attached to three women. Secondary meanings include "foul things; scoundrels, ruffians and robbers; spurious, fake; external and internal chaos; crafty, perverse, cunning, treacherous; illicit sexual intercourse; secret communication with the enemy; rape."[2] The second version, which is most often used in the binomial compound, Hanjian, has, among other significances, the additional meaning of "transgression."[3] This jian is more like a transitive verb: "to commit adultery, to have sex; to break the law; to oppose someone; to trespass, violate, and encroach."[4]
There are behind all these various signifiers three deeply connected meanings of jian that eventually adhere to the term "traitor." The first is the notion of illicitly
The compound hanjian came into general usage during the Song dynasty when it described Han (that is, Chinese) officials who spied for the Jurchen Jin dynasty. According to the most authoritative dictionary in use in the People's Republic of China at present, a hanjian, then, "is someone who helps a different race [yizhong] harm his or her own race [tongzhong]."[5] Needless to say the term is more particularistic than such a definition properly would allow: that is, you have to be Han in order to be a hanjian. Semantically, in other words, it is difficult to separate political treason from ethnic transgression.[6]
GOING OVER
The two iniquities—betraying universal cultural norms and joining exclusive ethnic enemies—coincided during foreign invasions of China, when the term hanjian was hung as a crude label of infamy around the necks of collaborators. At the time of the Ming-Qing transition, the greatest traitors in Ming officials' eyes were hanjian who crossed over to the Manchus just before they "entered the pass" in 1644 and occupied the Central Plains. Earlier boundary crossers, or transfrontiersmen, had ambiguous ethnic identities, but their loyalties to the new Qing dynasty were squarely centered on the person of the Manchu khan-emperor to whom they had declared allegiance. It was the later adherents, such as Hong Chengchou and Wu Sangui, who earned historians' opprobrium, though the notion of betraying the Han ethnie was intentionally muffled by the time of the Qianlong literary inquisition, when Confucian treachery was identified with the label of "twice-serving ministers" (er chen) for those who had been Ming officials before joining the Qing. Of course, the tension nonetheless persisted between Qing culturalism, with its universalistic monarchic pretensions, and the ethnic particularisms of both holders and subjects of the throne.[7]
Even prior to Qianlong's reign (1736–95), despite this late-cultural/early-national tension, the term hanjian was widely used within the Qing bureaucracy to designate Chinese who had "gone over" to the tribal peoples of southwestern China.[8] On the part of Qing viceroys and governors there were two impulses along the Miao frontier. One, which was associated with ascriptive officials (Manchu or Han Martial bannermen), was to prevent intermarriage and blame "undependable Han traitors" (wulai hanjian) for bringing about difficulties with the Miao. The second was to acculturate the Miao, not segregate them, even if this meant widespread intermarriage across ethnic boundaries. In the early eighteenth century, the Qing government attempted to enforce a quarantine legislated in 1707. Han residence was forbidden in Miao hamlets, and the Miao were prohibited from travel into the interior. Hanjian were those Chinese who crossed over the
Under the Qianlong emperor, who ruled over a society much more integrated than the formations of the early 1700s, the acculturalists gradually won out. "As the segregationists lost the argument, their tendency to see Han traitors behind every thicket was discredited," and it was not until the Western aggressions of the nineteenth century that the figure of the hanjian widely reappeared.[10]
TRAITORS AND TRANSGRESSION
The Opium War brought traitors—neiying (fifth columnists), maiguozhe (sellouts or collaborators), jianshang (treacherous merchants), and hanjian—back as primary scapegoats for the Manchu dynasty's defeat by the British Empire. Whether as unscrupulous lictors working for the Pomeranian missionary Gutzlaff when he assumed a local magistracy under English guns, or as a local prefect ransoming Canton from the H.M.S. Nemesis, "traitors" were blamed for selling out the country.[11] My purpose is not to dwell upon this rich historical theme in the nineteenth century, however, but rather to note again the connection between ethnocultural treachery and the crossing of boundaries by collusion with foreigners, linked in turn with bestiality, sexual violation, and demonic behavior.[12]
One way of diminishing the cognitive friction between universal and particular identities was to equate humankindness with Hanness. To be read out of the corporate group was to become "other," to lose one's ability to be genuinely human, to leave behind or "transgress" (jian) being Chinese (Han) or even being just a man (han).[13] In this sense, the ethnic condition of Hanness was a human state, which governed the trajectory one traced in the course of "crossing over" (jian) into nonhumanness. And leaving that state meant associating with demons or animals, such as the "pigs" (zhu), or Catholic missionaries depicted in the anti-Christian posters of that period.[14]
In the popular mentality of the twentieth century, treachery (or being a hanjian) was also an alienation, an act of madness, that could cut one off from other Chinese people. In a 1938 article entitled "School Principal Becomes a Traitor" ("Xiaozhang zuo hanjian"), it was reported, "Former elementary school principal, Chen Qibai, lost all capacity for self-respect after the War of Resistance began. When the capital was occupied, he took his family from the Yong [River, near Ningbo], and ended by losing his conscience and being stricken with madness [sangxin bingkuang]. He changed his name to Chen Daoliang and publicly accepted a post as a secretary in the puppet Executive Yuan in Nanjing."[15] Thus, to be a hanjian was to lose the capacity for moral judgment, along with one's primal identity and bestowed name.
After the collapse of the First United Front in 1927 and the commencement of the White Terror, the Communist Party formed a special assassination team under Zhou Enlai's Special Services Committee (Tewu weiyuanhui). The group was formally
TREACHERY AND APPEASEMENT
The stronghold of the Chiang Kai-shek régime's campaign against national traitors was a circle of Chiang's own students—Whampoa cadets who founded the Lixingshe (Vigorous Action Society) in February 1932 after Chiang resumed power. Although they were devoutly anti-Communist cadres, these members of the Lixingshe, which formed the core of the Blue Shirts, or Lanyishe, were aroused by Japan's aggression in China. Many of them had been studying in military or police academies in Japan at the time of the Manchurian Railway Incident (September 1931), and after they organized a demonstration in Tokyo that was broken up by the police, they returned to China and joined the Anti-Japanese National Salvation Association of Returned Students from Japan (Liu-Ri xuesheng kang-Ri jiuguo hui), formed by Gong Debo and others under the leadership of He Zhonghan's friend and classmate Xiao Zanyu. Gong Debo's newspaper, Jiuguo ribao (National salvation daily), printed editorial after editorial calling for the Chinese to "resist the Japanese and root out traitors" (kang Ri chu jian), and although Gong himself took no part in the activities of the Lixingshe, many members of that secret organization's "preparations department" used the newspaper as a cover for their own work, pretending to be editors or reporters.[19]
The Blue Shirts who belonged to the Lixingshe were fanatically dedicated to supporting their "leader" (lingxiu), Chiang Kai-shek, and to extirpating traitors (hanjian).[20] The Lixingshe's "backbone cadres" believed that hanjian were both a manifestation and a cause of the weakness of China, reflecting the absence of a national spirit or people's will such as animated the Japanese race. They believed that
the racial will [minzu yizhi] of the Chinese masses is extremely weak, which can be confirmed by the multitudinous numbers of Chinese traitors [hanjian] and thieves who have sold out their country [maiguozei]…. One can almost say that there is absolutely no parallel to this ugly phenomenon in all the other countries of the world. In the Northeast [i.e., Manchuria] and in the Yangzi Valley they shamelessly seek power and wealth by selling out their country. You could say that the interior of China is carpeted with hanjian. This is because as modern China suffered one defeat
In other words, not only were outright collaborators—whose motives had, in many cases, to be mixed—simply to be labeled hanjian and marked for execution; "indirect" or passive onlookers were designated potential targets as well. Moreover, this indiscriminate persecution by terrorist elements of the Guomindang right wing was to be justified as a means of addressing the humiliation suffered by the nation at the hands of foreign aggressors during the previous century. This marked loss of national self-confidence in the Chinese, seen now as an "inferior race" (liedeng minzu), which the late Lloyd Eastman explored in his pioneering study of the Nanjing decade, was a far cry from the culturalist self-confidence of the Qianlong period—though the term hanjian was used in both cases.
URBAN COLLABORATION
To be sure, the Blue Shirts had already witnessed the sorry spectacle of Chinese collaborators working closely with the enemy during the Japanese Occupation of Shanghai's northern Zhabei district from January to May 1932. During the attack on Zhabei, the term hanjian was applied to Chinese who looted in the wake of the assault by Japanese marines and soldiers on Shanghai's North Station. It was quickly extended to cover collaborators who were said to have gone into the combat zones to "make trouble" by working for the Japanese. Two hundred of these hanjian were believed to be Chinese secret agents from northern Jiangsu (Jiangbei or Subei) and Anhui, and a number of them were rounded up and shot by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau and the Nationalist Army.[22]
Once the Japanese drove the Nineteenth Route Army out of Shanghai and established a military occupation, a group of Chinese collaborators formed the Zhabei Citizens Maintenance Association, which was also known as the Shanghai Northern District Citizens Maintenance Association. It began as a street-cleaning operation at a time when Zhabei's thoroughfares were littered with corpses. On March 24, 1932, the Japanese army engaged 150 Chinese coolies to sweep the streets from Suzhou Creek all the way up to North Station. They were supervised by Chinese foremen, probably Subei gangsters, and paid with funds generated by a monthly tax levied on all of the street traders in Zhabei. The operation was run out of the former Zhabei municipal finance office by an organization called the Great Japan New Political Affairs Bureau, which was a puppet "municipal organ"
The identification of these collaborators with natives of Subei—an ethnic subgroup already treated with negative prejudice by other Shanghainese sojourners—reinforced the connection between hanjian and outsiders beyond the pale.[24] Three prominent racketeers were involved in the puppet organization: Gu Zhuxuan, his brother Gu Sungmao, and Wei Zhongxiu. Gu Zhuxuan, the "emperor of Subei," was one of the most infamous gangsters in Shanghai. His brother Gu Sungmao was a former rickshaw coolie who now worked as a foreman in the Star Rickshaw Company and owned a theater that featured Subei dialect performances. Wei Zhongxiu, also a native of Subei, was the former chief detective of the Public Safety Bureau and a disciple of the Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng. Shanghainese and foreigners alike, then, spoke of "Jiangbei traitors" as if their corrupt collaboration with the Japanese Military Police could be explained by the men's darkskinned faces and hillbilly manners.[25] The public had by April 10 become so "dissatisfied with the foul tactics of these traitors" that the Japanese decided to dissolve the Maintenance Association while they prepared to return Zhabei to the Chinese Nationalist régime.[26]
BLUE SHIRTS
While the Japanese gave up their occupied sectors of Shanghai under international pressure, they moved ahead in north China, consolidating their occupation of Rehe and attacking Zhahar (Chahar). The Christian warlord Feng Yuxiang decided to make a bid for national leadership by mobilizing a resistance movement. Coming out of his self-imposed retirement at Zhangjiakou, Feng announced the formation of the People's Allied Anti-Japanese Army (Minzhong kang-Ri tongmeng jun) on May 26, 1933, and began gathering troops.[27] Chiang Kai-shek, however, was thoroughly convinced of the importance of appeasing Japan in order to buy time to exterminate the Communists.[28] On May 31, five days after General Feng's announcement, Chiang's representative, Huang Fu, negotiated a cease-fire with the Japanese. But public opinion seemed to support Feng. The Tanggu Truce was decried as a sellout and Huang Fu denounced as a pro-Japanese hanjian.[29]
Chiang's Blue Shirts, fully accepting the generalissimo's policy of annei rangwai (first pacify the interior, then expel the external aggressor), shifted their attention to another sort of traitor: those who might collaborate with the Japanese by taking the role of puppet governor under the Occupation. By then, Dai Li, the future head of Juntong (Military Statistics, which was a euphemism for the secret police), was fully in charge of the Blue Shirts' intelligence and covert operations. Under his orders to assail internal rather than external enemies (a redirection that sometimes smacked of scapegoating), secret agent Zheng Jiemin arranged the assassination of Zhang Jingyao, the Hunanese warlord then negotiating with the Japanese.[30] Zhang's demise was meant to scare other hanjian out of collaborating with the Japanese.
For there was a significant stratum of political figures, many of them former Beiyang militarists and bureaucrats, who bore a deep antipathy toward the party of Sun Yatsen and other southerners who had adopted a radical agenda of revolutionary nationalism. Culturally conservative and often trained in Japanese military academies and universities in the last years of the Qing, these northern Chinese leaders saw little harm in cooperating with victorious Japanese generals in the name of a new order in East Asia that would repel Anglo-American imperialism on the one hand, and Soviet Bolshevism on the other. And even if they did not want to venture as far as outright collaboration, they could easily see that it was to their advantage to create a gray zone of complex and ambiguous loyalties that left them some room for maneuver.
Dai Li's strategy, however, was to force these political actors to choose between being live heroes or dead hanjian. Gan Guoxun, one of the Lixingshe's founders, later said that the assassination of Zhang Jingyao "aroused and excited the heroes [haojie] of Yan and Zhao[,]… completely changing the social atmosphere of northern China, which was feudal and self-indulgent. All those hanjian, such as Wang Kemin, Wang Jitang, and Gao Wenyue, went into hiding. Squirming like worms, they were afraid to make any move whatsoever. Representative northern warlord figures such as Duan Qirui and Wu Peifu bowed to public opinion and pledged loyalty to the center."[31]
Zhang Jingyao's assassination also convinced the Japanese that the Blue Shirts were responsible for most of the terrorism directed against hanjian in north China during the period 1934–35, and at their insistence the Lanyishe was supposedly disbanded. In fact, it continued to operate under other guises, partly as an agency engaged in anti-Japanese activities commanded by General Dai Li and partly as a rubric for numerous patriotic and terrorist activities directed against hanjian throughout China.[32]
WAR AND NATIONAL SALVATION
War broke out between China and Japan after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside Beiping on the night of July 7, 1937. Even before then, a Shanghai "merchants militia" (shangtuan) had been formed by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which had taken out advertisements in the Shanghai press offering free courses in civic training to shop assistants.[33] During the six weeks between the on-set of fighting in north China and the eruption of conflict in the Yangzi delta on August 13, more citizen volunteer groups were formed in Shanghai under the loose supervision of the Nationalist general Zhang Jizhong.[34]
On July 15, for example, the Chinese Youth National Salvation Association was formally inaugurated at the Guandi Temple, where a depot had been established. More than a thousand people showed up to hear speeches by the head of the association, Zhao Gangyi, and by the chief of its execution department, Sun Yaxing.[35] A number of those who came then or later in answer to advertisements
These new members of the National Salvation Association—all students, apprentices, or shop assistants—attended lectures on the current political situation, and then were asked on July 21 to volunteer to dig fortifications outside Shanghai. About two hundred men, mostly between eighteen and twenty-one years old, volunteered, and under Sun Yaxing's command they proceeded to Nanxiang, where they were attached to the Eighty-seventh Nationalist Division. For the next month, supplied with food but not pay, they dug trenches, working mostly at night to avoid Japanese bombers.[38]
CO-OPTATION
After war broke out in Zhabei on August 13, the Nationalist secret service began to take over these paramilitary operations. General Dai Li met with the Green Gang leader Du Yuesheng in the French Concession to discuss the formation of a Pudong Guerrilla Brigade, a Lake Tai Special Action Command, the Loyal and Patriotic Army (Zhongyi jiuguo jun), and eventually the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Operations Committee.[39] And at the beginning of September Chiang Kai-shek's Military Affairs Commission approved the organization of an "emergency period service group" (feichang shiqi fuwutuan) to deal with traitors and spies in Shanghai. The Military Affairs Commission subsequently put this group under the orders of General Wang Jingjiu, commander of the Eighty-seventh Nationalist Division, housing its Special Services Squad (Tewutuan) in the Shaoxing guild hall in Nandao.[40]
The Special Services Squad also had an investigation section, which was charged with collecting evidence on hanjian so that the police could arrest the collaborators and turn them over to the Special Services Squad headquarters for questioning.[41] So deputized, members of the investigation group and other such patriotic volunteers had ample opportunities to form "antitraitor societies" to extort money from merchants dealing in Japanese goods.[42]
The Su-Zhe Operations Committee (Junshi weiyuanhui Su-Zhe xingdong weiyuan-hui), which was formed in late September to transform "gangland" (banghui) members into paramilitary cadres, was nominally chaired by Chiang Kai-shek. Its members included Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong, Wang Xiaolai, Yu Xiaqing, Zhang Xiaolin, Yang Hu, Mei Guangpei, Xiang Songpo, and Lu Jingshi. The secretary-general (shujizhang) was Dai Li, who used the authority of the committee to organize a General Command Headquarters for the Special Action Army (Biedong jun zongzhihui bu) located at Number 1 Shenjiazhai near Fenglinqiao opposite
The corpsmen themselves consisted mainly of retail clerks (dianyuan) from the Shanghai Shopkeepers Association, local ruffians (dipi and liumang) from the gangs, routed Guomindang soldiers, laborers thrown out of work by the closing of the factories and shops during the Japanese attack, and organized labor union members.[44] Once trained and armed with Mauser pistols, these units' primary purpose was "solely to locate traitors [hanjian]" and turn them over to the nearest Chinese police bureau.[45]
Others were former members of the Chinese Youth National Salvation Association. Toward the end of August, Sun Yaxing's group, for instance, had been renamed a Special Services Corps and transferred to Longhua for military training. In late September, after being provided grenades, pistols, and rifles, they were assigned to patrol the area surrounding the martial law commander's headquarters at West Gate. The corpsmen were authorized to take whatever measures they deemed necessary "to suppress traitors": if they arrested persons "for perpetrating traitorous acts," the suspects were tried by a military court within the headquarters and summarily executed when found guilty.[46]
Naysayers later described the Special Services Corps as "a motley rabble" (wu he zhi zhong) that had very little military effectiveness against the Japanese.[47] The units that were supposed to defend the zone from the south bank of Suzhou Creek along Fanwangdu and Caojiadu across to Rihuigang did quickly retreat once the Japanese launched an attack across Suzhou Creek.[48] But Sun Yaxing's company, which was dispatched to the police station on the Nandao Bund in late October 1937 to help the police reserve unit defend the area from attack by the Japanese from the Huangpu River, held its ground. This was where the last stand of the Chinese Nationalist forces took place on November 11, the final day of the Battle of Shanghai.[49] Some Special Services corpsmen fought valiantly and died at the water's edge. Others made their way into the French Concession and International Settlement, where the authorities rounded them up and interned them in special camps—camps that became breeding grounds for the urban terrorists who would continue the war against hanjian long after the last contingent of Special Services Corps formally withdrew from Shanghai on February 1, 1938, after issuing a farewell letter to the Chinese press stating that they were leaving the concessions "for the safety of the residents of the foreign settlements." One newspaper commented, "The death of most of the Chinese traitors may have been the work of the corps."[50]
PUPPETS
On December 5, 1937, Su Xiwen, a Waseda-educated philosopher, inaugurated "the Great Way" (the Dadao) puppet municipal government of Shanghai.[51] Su
In truth, the Dadao puppet government was short-lived, at least in nomenclature.[58] The malodorous characteristics of its leading members, a potpourri of Venerable Mother religious cultists, smugglers, gamblers, narcotics dealers, panderers, and former rickshaw pullers, were liability enough.[59] But just as damaging was the Japanese handlers' contempt for Su Xiwen, whose philosophizing was not taken very seriously after the Special Services brought in a tough north China hanjian named Wang Zihui to run their Shanghai operations.[60]
Meanwhile, the poet Liang Hongzhi, a former Beiyang bureaucrat, had been "casting romantic glances" (song qiubo) at the Japanese, making known his availability as a collaborator.[61] Consequently, after the puppet administrations in north China were incorporated in January 1938 into a single provisional government (Linshi zhengfu, Rinji seifu) under Wang Kemin in Beiping, in south China a reform government (Weixin zhengf u, Ishin seifu) was set up in March 1938 in Nanjing headed by Liang Hongzhi.[62]
The puppet régime announced that it would establish a constitutional government, wipe out single-party dictatorship, exterminate the Communists, safeguard East Asia from "redification" (chihua), consolidate peaceful cooperation between China and Japan, return refugees to their homes, establish peace-preservation organizations (baoan zuzhi) to exterminate bandits and "cleanse the villages" (qing-xiang), stimulate industrial and agricultural production with the help of foreign capital from "friendly countries" (you bang), revamp education to combine traditional moral values and international scientific learning, abolish excessive taxes, encourage men of talent to come forward and freely criticize the government, and severely restrict the corrupt tyranny of petty officials and clerks.[63]
Shanghai sympathizers, together with members of the Special Services Department of the Japanese Central China Area Army garrison in Nandao, tepidly celebrated the establishment of the new reform government on March 28, 1938. The puppet Self-Government Committee held one meeting in the Confucian
Within a month, on April 28, 1938, the reform government had commissioned a new Supervisory Yamen (duban gongshu) to take over the functions of municipal administration formerly wielded by the Dadao puppet régime.[66] Su Xiwen formally recognized the superior legitimacy of the reform government by adopting its flag on May 3, but he continued as head of the Supervisory Yamen until October 15, 1938, when Fu Xiaoan assumed office as mayor of the Shanghai Special Municipality (Shanghai tebie shi).[67] Once ousted, Su Xiwen was named puppet mayor of Hankou but actually repaired to Tokyo—perhaps to evade assassination.[68]
FU XIAOAN'S PERFIDY
Fu Xiaoan, director of the Chinese Bank of Commerce (Shangtong yinhang) and head of the General Chamber of Commerce, was a bitter enemy of Chiang Kai-shek, who had thrown him in prison in 1927.[69] After serving out his sentence and spending a period of exile in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, Fu returned to Shanghai determined to take revenge upon the generalissimo ("I am worth fifty million dollars, but I will spend every dollar I have to get even with Chiang"). In the eyes of most Shanghainese it was Fu's vindictiveness that led him to run the risk to his reputation and eventually to his life by becoming Shanghai's most nefarious hanjian.[70]
The damage to Fu's reputation was immediate. In the press of the time, his was just another "puppet show" manipulated by his Japanese masters.[71] At best, he and the poetaster Liang Hongzhi were compared to literati collaborators of the early Qing, such as Hou Fangyu, who pretended to be "recluses" (yimin) but were actually "adherents" (shunmin) of the Manchu invaders. One journalist remarked that when a country seems about to be destroyed, one sees spilled blood, broken heads, and "brave heroes" who refuse to submit, knowing that their honor will be recorded later in the pages of history. But one also sees a lot of people losing heart and becoming "treacherous elements." These "traitors" (hanjian) and "sellouts" (guozei) pass their lives well, perhaps even dedicating poems to the "brave heroes," comforting themselves with the thought that they are "managing the peace," and pretending to make a sacrifice as "unsung heroes" themselves.[72]
To such critics of hypocrisy, Fu Xiaoan himself would answer that he was merely being a "realist" (xianshizhuyizhe), working with the conquerors for the sake of the Chinese people. But it was hard to maintain that position when, like so
His "realism," in other words was too self-serving to be plausible. Left-wing columnist Ding San insisted that the true "realism" was the vision of China's warriors struggling to gaze ahead to the clarity of absolute truth, siding with the peoples of the world against aggression and invasion in places like Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia. Fu's "realism," however, was nearsighted and self-interested; it characterized those in China who had elected to join the anti-Communist federation and the movement to compromise for peace. By so doing these "realists" had become "quasi traitors" (zhunhanjian) or "traitors" (hanjian) to that higher global cause.[73]
POLARIZATION
In France, when divisions sharpened after the November 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa, collabo became a general term of opprobrium. Occupied China began during 1938 to witness a similar polarization between the "warriors" of resistance and the "traitors" of collaboration—a polarization that reinforced a spirit of mass national unity by blaming collaboration on a small group of misbegotten traitors.[74] This can be seen, for example, in a lengthy series of letters supposedly written by a young woman, "the daughter of a traitor," to her lover, "a warrior of the resistance."[75]
Lying in bed in the moonlight she repeatedly calls out his name, "Jian," to tell him of her pain and grief.[76] "Even though I am the daughter of a traitor, I am certainly not a traitor myself." Who could have thought that this quiet place would fall into enemy hands? How could she have possibly foreseen that her father would "passively" become the head of the puppet Maintenance Association (Weichi-hui)?[77]
By the time she realized that she was in the lair of the Japanese "demons" (emo), it was too late: she had already been seized by the god of misfortune. She had thought of committing suicide, but instead she had coped by pretending to be happy and sympathetic whenever she had to talk with "them." How could they ever possibly know the internal pain she was suffering? In this bitter environment, she secreted her three years with Jian, when they promised each other to be forever like two stars twinkling in the summer sky, never to be extinguished unless the heavens themselves perished. The memory of that love kept her alive, ready to seek an escape. "I don't blame you," she tells Jian, for despising her as a Japanese soldier's mistress. "No one could understand the circumstances I have been in." She constantly thinks of his life as a warrior. When "they" lament guerrilla victories, she secretly exults, happy that "you are one of our aweinspiring Chinese men." When she hears that "our armies increase in strength," her heart is entirely soothed.[78]
At one time, she thought of running away and joining Jian, but she is watched too closely. And even if she could join the guerrillas, she is not sure that Jian would forgive her. Besides, she can use her position in the enemy's camp to do more effective work than she could as a guerrilla.[79] "You don't believe that?" Does Jian think that "the weak daughter of a hanjian" couldn't possibly have the strength to do significant work? The truth is, she already has accomplished something that no one—not even her father—knows about. Because the "demons" banzhang (Japanese hanchō, squad leader) believed that the deputy Maintenance Association chief was extorting too much from the people, the "demons" had him shot in order to maintain their reputation. But it was really she who "exterminated the traitor with a borrowed knife" (jie dao chu jian) by tricking the "demons."[80]
She has to confess that ever since the deputy chief was killed, she has been afraid that his ghost would return, especially on nights like this in the moonlight, which makes her hair stand on end. But then she loses her fear of that "thing" (dongxi), because she knows the souls of "our brave warriors" of the resistance are striking down his ghost in the underworld. He is to be abominated, not feared. When you are full of zealous hatred, fear is gone.
Now she has reached a critical phase, which is also her greatest opportunity. She wants to use the last, minute fraction of her life to fulfill this soul-satisfying task.[81] Three times "demons" have wanted to "eat me up," but she survived each time: "If I were a weakling—Jian! Before, I often told you that I was a weakling, that I was an absolutely helpless and absolutely passive weakling. But now I have to deny it. I believe that I'm not only not a weakling, I'm not one of those ordinary, backward women weaklings. Rather I am a strong-willed and determined person, a bold and imposing Chinese person. Don't you see? If I were still a weakling, how could I have been eaten up, invaded, and yet not have committed suicide? But I am still alive today, and I will not be eaten up, I will not be invaded."[82] Her plan is to kill the Japanese squad leader who has ravished her; for "demons always will be demons—they lack the rational ability of civilized human beings."[83]
The metaphor of the ravished or "eaten" woman applied to an invaded China is not, of course, new. Even before Zou Rong's Revolutionary Army (Geming jun), it appears in variant in the poetry of Wu Weiye and the dramaturgy of Kong Shangren. And it was certainly a common symbol, as numerous scholars have recently pointed out, during the 1930s and ′40s. Here, however, it gives form to feelings about the Japanese, who have literally raped their way up the Yangzi River, that spill over onto their collaborators. The Japanese are "demons" who "eat up" Chinese women; they are beings without souls or reason. The hanjian, fit to be denounced by their own daughters, are turned into hungry ghosts, "things," who deserve to be slaughtered in life as in death.[84] Indeed, to renounce them and to kill the enemy is to cease being a "backward" weak woman and to become an "imposing" and virile Chinese warrior.[85]
In her last letter to Jian, the "daughter of a hanjian" reveals her final plan. The emo has asked her to marry him. She consents, telling the Japanese "demon" that
The polarization of "heroes" and "traitors" served the United Front well. Candidly admitting that after the retreat from Wuhan in December there were numerous "wavering elements" (dongyao fenzi) among the Chinese, the resistance press stressed the importance of "sharing a bitter hatred of the enemy" (tongchou dikai)—that is, hatred of both the Japanese occupiers and their hanjian puppets— in order to close ranks around a United Front that had brought the Communist Party back into national politics.[87] On January 1, 1939, the Nationalist government in Chongqing issued an announcement "strictly dealing with hanjian":
Since the beginning of all-out war with Japan, there is not a single one of the soldiers and civilians of the entire country who does not share a bitter hatred for the enemy. Taking the nation and the people as the foundation, they steadfastly resist and vow never to waver. Now, there is a small number of perverse and demented [sangxin bingkuang] followers who are willing to be used by the enemy invaders and to slavishly serve the foe like a ghost [seeking out victims] for the tiger [weihu zuochang] in an utterly loathsome way.[88] The government has already explicitly ordered the Military Affairs Commission to investigate, order the arrest of, and severely punish according to the law those [who] have participated in each area's puppet organizations. Moreover, it has already promulgated regulations regarding the punishment of hanjian and clearly designated each of the criminal sanctions for collaborationist acts, issuing orders that they be implemented in order to clean out the traitors. Now, just as the circumstances of the War of Resistance take a turn for the better, the Japanese invaders have one layer of crafty schemes after another. If we don't root out the scoundrels, then how are we going to maintain social order?[89]
The Nationalist government was willing to forgive those former traitors who "washed their hearts" (xixin), because it believed in the possibility of self-renewal. But those who continued to be traitors to the people (minzu pantu), who continued to act publicly as puppets or to behave clandestinely as hanjian, not only risked the wrath of Heaven, but they also faced public elimination by their fellow citizens.[90]
The increasing polarization of Nationalist heroes and puppet traitors was one result of the defection of Wang Jingwei from the Chongqing régime and his launching of a "peace movement" (heping yundong) to hold talks with the Japanese.[91] Yet even as his enemies styled him a hanjian in increasingly absolutist terms, Wang
According to Zhou Fohai's diary, on May 13, 1940, Wang Jingwei remarked outside the Japanese military headquarters in Hankou that back in Chongqing people called each other "national heroes" (minzu yingxiong), while he was being styled a hanjian even though he and his allies thought of themselves as "national heroes" too.[93] The fact of the matter was that whether or not one ended by being a minzu yingxiong depended on whether one ended by "saving the country" (jiuguo). Wang and his friends believed that the only sure way to "save the country" was to seek a peaceful solution: "If I end up as a national hero, then there will forever be peace between China and Japan. If I end up as a traitor, then we will never be able to resolve the discord between China and Japan."[94]
Later that year, on September 2, Wang said in Beiping: "One group of Chinese wants to kill me. One group of Japanese also wants to kill me. Each has their own evidence [to justify this]. This proves my position correct. The Chinese wanting to kill me proves that I am not advocating a War of Resistance. The Japanese wanting to kill me proves that I am not a traitor [hanjian]."[95] According to Zhu Zijia, this same attitude colored the thinking and behavior of Wang Jingwei's entourage. They tried to hold fast to the notion of their being "national heroes," but the environment around them finally convinced them that they might well end up being vilified as "traitors."[96]
Wang's brother-in-law, Chu Minyi, initially believed that there were two aspects to the war against Japan: one was military resistance, which was Chiang Kai-shek's task, and the other was peace negotiations, which was Wang Jingwei's assignment. After all, Chiang himself had said that "resistance was easy, peace was hard." That was why Chu had decided to join the peace movement and "compromise out of consideration for the general interest" (weiqu qiu quan): "If I don't descend into hell, then who else will descend into hell?"[97] Li Shengwu, minister of education for Wang, declared during his trial in 1946, "At that time most men of resolve [zhishi] said that if Mr. Wang really could protect the nation's position, penetrating deep into the enemy's rear area, pursuing the task of saving the country, it could well be of modest benefit to the War of Resistance."[98]
The ambiguity—and ambivalence—of collaboration was explored twenty years after Pearl Harbor by Zhu Zijia in the preface to the fourth volume of his memoirs on the Nanjing régime. In a complex culturalist response to the stigmatization of hanjian, he wrote:
One other objective in writing this book is to speak to all of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor[99] and let them know that this group of people called hanjian are not the demons portrayed in propaganda or in their imaginations. Chen Gongbo said, "It is right to resist, but there is no alternative to peace." Zhou Fohai also said, "The War of Resistance is meant to save the nation. Peace is also meant to save the nation." Consequently, in this entire book I have absolutely never found fault with the
But all of that complex cultural equivocation was wiped away at the time by the direct and simple issue of national betrayal. On January 5, 1939, Li Zongren described Wang Jingwei as someone who "betrayed his party and country" (beipan dangguo). Others accused him of selling out his country for personal gain, of becoming the Franco of the Far East, and of being a Japanese "yes-man vermin" (yingshengchong).[101] So many Chinese had compromised with the Japanese in north China because they had lacked self-esteem, because they had thought they were an inferior race (liedeng minzu), because they had been told they were the "sick man of Asia" (dongya bingf u). The Chinese had to cast aside such self-doubt and prove they were humankind's "most excellent race" (youxiu minzu) by repudiating the traitors in their midst—even if they were members of one's own family.[102]
The attack on hanjian would not only restore self-esteem; it would also corroborate the patriotic identity that Chinese shared under the Occupation. Shanghai newspaper editors declared in December 1938, "Coexisting on an isolated island, we feel all the more that we are Chinese, and that our responsibility to be Chinese citizens is all the heavier. We also feel that, with the exception of shameless hanjian, we are all the more cordial and kind to each other."[103] Although "Chinese do not attack Chinese," the people must also understand that the "big traitors" (da hanjian) had to be brought to justice.[104]
The editors of Yibao wrote in May 1939, "Ever since Wang Jingwei betrayed the country and fled into exile, all of the country's people have come to recognize the face of a hanjian in his communicating with the enemy and seeking to surrender, and they have unanimously supported the central [government's] sanctions upon him, as the struggle to oppose Traitor Wang is centrally linked to the struggle against hanjian." That same editorial called upon the central government to purge all Wang Jingwei elements, to punish those who suggested compromise with the enemy, to mobilize forces to attack Wang elements in Shanghai, to make Wang the theoretical center of the attack against hanjian, to expose his treacherous activities, and to use the campaign to elevate the morale-building drives then going on in Free China to mobilize support against the Japanese.[105]
By then, the lines were clearly drawn. However sensitive the "peace party" collaborators were to their own ambivalence, word had gone out to one and all that hanjian were simply traitors to be read out of the Chinese race. Solidarity and resistance demanded the traitors be eliminated. Hanjian did not deserve to be killed only because they were "treacherous merchants" smuggling black market rice and driving up the price for decent Chinese;[106] or because they opened up opium supply
Beginning in October 1938, the resistance newspaper Wenxian began to publish lists of puppet officials and local police chiefs, entitled "Investigation Charts to Root Out Traitors [chujian]."[109] In November, the entire roster of Liang Hongzhi's "flocks" (qunchou) of puppets at all levels of the reform government was printed, and that was followed by further lists of the "betrayers of the masses" (qunjian) in north China, Zhejiang, Anhui, Shanxi, and Jiangsu.[110] By January and February of 1939, the newspaper was publishing the local Shanghai office and residence addresses of reform government officials, including bureau and department chiefs of the Shanghai municipal puppet government.[111] In April, Wenxian printed a list of local district chiefs (qugongshuzhang), along with their salaries from the puppet régime, for Pudong, Nanshi, Huxi, Zhabei, Baoshan, Chuansha, and Nanhui. And that was followed in turn by lists of addresses of the managing editors of thirty hanjian newspapers in the Jiang delta and of the owners of fourteen opium shops (and their revenues, which totaled 225,000 yuan per month) in the Caojiadu badlands.[112] Each of these designations amounted to disgrace at best, death at worst—even to those puppets under the tightest protection and in the highest places.[113]
Shortly before dawn on October 11, 1940, the puppet mayor Fu Xiaoan's cook, Zhu Shengyuan, stole silently by the hanjian's bodyguards to slash the sleeping mayor to death with a butcher's cleaver.[114] Zhu had worked for Fu for twelve years, but he had set aside personal loyalty for a higher cause when he was secretly recruited for the Nationalist secret service by General Dai Li.[115]
TARGETING HANJIAN
With the Second United Front agreement reasonably secure, Dai Li's men turned their attention to the Japanese and their collaborators. By 1938, the Military Statistics Bureau, or Juntong, had been formally separated from the civilian secret police and placed under Dai Li's direction. One of its primary missions was to prevent any of Chiang Kai-shek's rivals from opening peace talks with the Japanese and forming a plausible puppet government. The key to this effort was Shanghai, where Nationalist agents could use the safe haven of the concessions to mount terrorist operations against hanjian.[116]
The Shanghai station of Juntong was quickly disabled after the Japanese took over the Chinese sectors of the city. However, Dai Li managed to maintain two special operations units through the period of "island Shanghai" (November 1937 to December 1941). Because of Chiang Kai-shek's fury over the "treacherous activities" of collaborators in the city, these two covert action units under Zhao Lijun and
It is important to recognize the special place accorded to assassins in ancient Chinese history, as well as in the rise of revolutionary nationalism during the twentieth century.[120] In the second-century Wu family shrine, celebrated as a quintessential expression of the Confucian culture of Eastern Han, there are engraved thirty-three picture stories exemplifying the virtues of filial sons, wise ministers, eminent wives, virtuous rulers, and so forth, of the past. Six of those thirty-three wall carvings are "stories" of loyal assassin-retainers: Cao Mei seizing Duke Huan of Qi, Zhuan Zhu assassinating King Liao of Wu, Jing Ke's attempt to assassinate the king of Qin, Yao Li's assassination of Prince Qing Ji of Wu, Yu Rang's attempt to kill Xiang Zi of Zhao, and Nie Zheng's assassination of the uncle of the king of Han.[121] Each of these commoners was regarded as a hero because he sacrificed his own life without hesitation to kill his master's enemy out of a divine anger animated by loyalty rather than personal rancor. As Liu Xiang put it in the Shuo yuan (A garden of talks), "When Zhuan Zhu assassinated King Liao, [his movement] was like a comet attacking the moon and like a falling star shining in bright daylight. When Yao Li assassinated Prince Qing Ji [his movement] was like a dark eagle striking a tower terrace. When Nie Zheng assassinated the uncle of the king of Han [his movement] was like a white rainbow crossing the sun. These three people were all commoners[,]…but when they were still nursing their anger, their power could even terrorize great kings."[122]
The first Chinese revolutionary to attempt political assassination was Shi Jianru, who tried, as a "man of determination" (zhishi), to kill the Manchu governor of Guangdong in October 1900.[123] Although Shi had no developed rationale of his own for this suicidal effort, his attempt marked a transition from the personal loyalty of feudal assassins to the political commitment of revolutionary nationalists, mediated by a certain purity of motive dedicated to a just cause. Other Chinese radicals influenced by Japanese anarchism and Russian nihilism began to enunciate a doctrine of sacrificial terrorism beginning in 1902. Yang Dusheng, a Chinese student at Waseda, learned of Russian revolutionary assassination efforts through the work of Kemuyama Sentaro, whose Modern Anarchism (Kinsei musei-fushugi) was translated into Chinese under the title Freedom's Blood (Ziyou xue); and Yang subsequently helped Huang Xing, the Hunanese student leader, to found the first of several assassination corps that culminated in the formation of the Northern Assassination Corps (beifang wansha tuan) in 1905.[124]
The Northern Assassination Corps was best known for its member Wu Yue, who tried to annihilate a delegation of five government political reform commissioners at the Beijing Railroad Station in September 1905. Wu Yue blew himself up instead, but he left behind a tract called Heaven's Vengeance (Tian tao) that was published in April 1907 in the Revolutionary Alliance organ, Min bao. The tract called for "assassinationism," quoting the reform movement martyr Tan Sitong; and it cited with admiration the conscripts' revolt led by Chen She against the tyrant of Qin as an example of the inspirational righteousness of the romantic xia, or medieval knight.[125]
Early on, then, the figure of the revolutionary assassin was cast with molds that originated in both the new world of international revolutionaries and the traditional realm of self-sacrificing knights-errant and loyal retainers pledged to avenge their masters' lives and honor. Although particular motivations varied from case to case, the assassinations of Enling, governor of Zhejiang, in 1907 by Xu Xiling; of Fuqi and Fenshan in Guangdong in 1911; and of Liang Bi by Peng Jiazhen in January 1912 partook of these two traditions that converged most dramatically on the eve of the Xinhai Revolution in the famed effort by Wang Jingwei to blow up the Manchu regent Zaifeng (Prince Chun).[126]
Political assassination did not cease once the Qing dynasty was overthrown, but—as in the infamous conspiracy of Yuan Shikai to murder Song Jiaoren in 1913—revolutionary pretexts were often absent. Moreover, during this period of political fragmentation, when boundless ambitions flourished, adventurers in the haohan (tough guy) tradition were not slow to present themselves as the leaders of armed men, mercenaries to some and loyal followers to others, willing and ready to serve as the "claws and teeth" of competing claimants to power. Dai Li was just such a leader himself, and he was by no means unique.
Personal heroism aside, the special operations of Dai Li's Juntong were facilitated by a large population of veterans and former members of the various citizens' volunteers corps and Special Services Corps that had sprung up during the first few months after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. We have observed how Sun Yaxing recruited followers and served in the Special Services Corps during the Battle of Shanghai. As a section leader with formal military training and as former head of the Chinese Youth National Salvation Association, he was a leading "warrior" (zhanshi) in the urban strife against collaborators after the city fell to the Japanese.
THE SUN YAXING TERRORIST GROUP
When Shanghai fell, Sun Yaxing managed to escape to Hangzhou, where the chairman of the provincial government instructed him to serve as a police officer in Shaoxing county. At the end of February 1938, possibly already under secret service control, he returned to Shanghai "with a view to bring[ing] all the former members of the Third Company of Special Services Corps, who were in Shanghai, to Hankou to further [the] National Salvation Movement in the latter city."[127]
By then Sun was already waiting for them, having precipitately left Shanghai when he saw a report in one of the newspapers that the leader of the Chinese Youth National Salvation Association—that is, Sun himself—was in the city.[129] Others, including Wang Zhigu, nephew of Wang Shihe, Chiang Kai-shek's chief bodyguard and executioner, joined Sun Yaxing on the spot.[130] The entire group was assigned different tasks. Ten were detailed for "special duty" in Changsha. Thirteen were told on April 25, 1938, that they had been chosen for urban guerrilla work in Shanghai "to suppress traitors."[131] This was the assassination group's one point of contact with General Dai Li, who told its members that they were under the direct orders of Sun Yaxing.[132] Joined by Wang Zhigu, the group was divided into three-or four-man teams, which proceeded via Jiujiang, Nanchang, Jin-hua, and Ningbo to Shanghai on May 1–2.[133]
Zhou Shougang, a printer from Chongming, had returned to Shanghai in February 1938, where he was completely dependent on relatives. One day in late June, Zhou bumped into Wang Zhigu and told him he was "practically destitute." Wang said that "he might be able to find [Zhou] work, should [he] care to participate in the assassination of ‘traitors.’" Zhou was willing to do so, and he repeated this when Wang Zhigu brought Sun Yaxing to his residence at 13 Rue du Weikwei. On July 3, Sun Yaxing told him to move his residence to 62 Route Vallon, where his job would be to function as Sun's courier.[134]
The same combination of circumstances—unemployment, a need for comrades, patriotism, a hatred of hanjian—drew in Chen Kaiguang, a teenager unable to find work since graduating from primary school.[135] Chen was approached by Zhao Liang, who invited him to join the Chinese Youth National Salvation Association. Out of patriotism Chen Kaiguang expressed his "willingness to help in the extermination of traitors." Zhao acknowledged the young man's idealism, but he told him that to prove his ultimate loyalty he would have to perform a special duty on July 7, 1938. Chen agreed to serve.[136]
Chen's duty was to commemorate the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident by setting off explosives in public places. The group had already wounded one of the commissioners of the puppet Shanghai Citizens Society, tried to kill racketeer Zhang Xiaolin, murdered two law clerks working for a collaborationist lawyer, and shot a Chinese who had adopted Japanese citizenship. On July 7, the group prepared to discharge a much more indiscriminate attack—as though the crusade against hanjian justified any measures whatsoever. Together, the teams launched eighteen grenade attacks, killing two Japanese mill employees and two Chinese, and wounding eight Chinese after tossing a bomb into a floating restaurant along the Shanghai Bund.[137]
During the ensuing uproar, the police rounded up more than a thousand suspects, the Japanese issued formal protests, and British and U.S. diplomats attempted
TERRORISM CONTINUES
Sun Yaxing's arrest failed to stop the attacks on hanjian simply because—as Sun admitted under interrogation— "[there is] more than one assassination group working on a line similar to that adopted by my squad."[140] On February 19, 1939, one of these other groups astonished the public by assassinating the heavily guarded foreign minister of the reform government, Chen Lu, in his own living room in the French Concession.[141] Liu Geqing led a team of Juntong assassins who shot down Chen Lu in front of his family and two guests.[142] As Chen Lu's body fell to the floor, Liu Geqing drew out a scroll and threw it over the traitor's body. It read in large black characters: "Death to the Collaborators. Long Live Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek!" Another sheet, unrolled across the sofa, read: "Resistance Will Result in Victory. Construction of the Country Will Succeed. Keep China's Property Forever!" Both were signed by the "Chinese Iron and Blood Army."[143]
Ten days later, the "Blood and Soul Traitor Extermination Corps" set off bombs simultaneously outside four Chinese dancing establishments: the Oriental Hotel, Ciro's, the Café and Paradise Ballroom, and the Great Eastern Ballroom. The terrorists left behind "A Warning to Our Dancing Friends" in the form of leaflets that read:
Dancing friends: some of you can dance the fox-trot, others the waltz. Why don't you go up to the front to kill? Some of you spend lavishly on brandy and whiskey. Why don't you give the money to our troops so that they can buy more munitions to kill the enemy?
Dancing friends: why spend your money for cosmetics when your bodies smell of the odor of a conquered people? The only way to remove that smell is to give your warm blood to the nation. You have been amusing yourselves over the Lunar New Year. Our meager gift tonight—bombs—will help to give you added pleasure.[144]
This mixed animus against the new bourgeoisie and political hanjian reflected the Blue Shirts' distaste for Westernized Shanghai. Clearly, the terrorists were enlarging
In early March 1939 the Shanghai branch of the Nationalist Party formed a People's Mobilization Society "to develop a wide-spread mass movement in Shanghai to carry on military, political, [and] all anti-Japanese and National Salvation work provided they are [sic] not contrary to the laws and ordinances of the Government." The society's manifesto read, "We swear [that] hereafter we will not live with the enemy robbers under the same sky, and will demonstrate the strength of the various classes of the people. Not only will the obstinate enemy in the suburbs be caused to shrink and to conceal themselves and to return Chinese territory to us, but also in the foreign concessions we should make known the heroic and unyielding spirit of descendants of our Chinese ancestors…. Some may assume responsibility for detection and secret service work; some may undertake the work of assaulting and killing the traitors."[146] A few days later terrorists tried to kill Zhu Ganting, the head of the puppet tax bureau in Pudong.[147] Though that attempt failed, the Nationalist "heroes" did succeed in their next major attack on a prominent hanjian: Xi Shitai, chief secretary (mishu zhuren) of the puppet police force in Shanghai.[148]
THE XI SHITAI ASSASSINATION
Xi Shitai, a Japanese-trained physician, practiced medicine in his own Shitai Hospital.[149] After the Nationalists withdrew from Shanghai, Dr. Xi joined the Japanese military press section and became Police Commissioner Lu Ying's principal secretary.[150] Xi Shitai was thus a prime target for assassination by Chongqing agents.[151]
The leader of the three-man assassination squad was a twenty-two-year-old Songjiang native named Yuan Dechang.[152] His two coconspirators were Peng Fulin, a slim twenty-year-old waiter, and a clothing salesman named Zhao Zhixiang.[153]
Zhao Zhixiang, a typical Shanghai xiao shimin (petty urbanite), was also twenty-two years old. After an apprenticeship in a French Concession tailor's shop, he had worked for five years as a sales clerk in two other "foreign dress shops." He had earned enough to marry the daughter of a villager back home in Pudong, but at the height of the depression in 1937, Zhao was laid off and had to go back to live with his brother. His wife returned to her mother's home, and they remained apart
On March 5, 1939, Zhao Zhixiang decided to cross the river to try to find a job once again in the unoccupied International Settlement. After searching in vain, he recalled once meeting Yuan Dechang, a man with Pudong guerrilla connections, who often used to book rooms in the Nanjing Hotel on Shanxi Road.[155] When Zhao Zhixiang approached the Nanjing Hotel telephone operator, Yuan Dechang immediately emerged from a back room.[156]
Yuan Dechang recognized Zhao, and told him to rendezvous on the afternoon of March 14 in front of the Great World amusement center.[157] Zhao Zhixiang duly showed up and was immediately taken by Yuan to a boardinghouse off of Rue Lafayette, where Yuan rented an attic room. That same day, the third member of the team, Peng Fulin, moved in with them. Thereafter the three lived together as "bosom friends." The attic was even large enough for Zhao Zhixiang to bring his wife into the city to stay for a week before going back home to Pudong.[158]
On the afternoon of April 4, 1939, Yuan Dechang sent Zhao Zhixiang out to buy food. Zhao returned to find Yuan and Peng cleaning a couple of pistols. Five days later, the three men moved to the Nanjing Hotel. Yuan and Peng came and went. Returning late on the night of April 10, the two agents told Zhao that the following morning they were going to "assassinate a traitor."[159] Their secret mission was confirmed by a letter signed by one Zhou Jianhua and supposedly sent to Zhao Zhixiang at a Ningbo address.[160] Yuan read the letter aloud to the other two semiliterate men. It spoke about three men carrying out the duties entrusted to them by the "four hundred million citizens" of China, and enjoined them to be "brave, steady, enthusiastic, [and] clever," and to "take exercises to make [their] bodies strong." It urged them to lead their lives "in accordance with the principles of the New Life Movement laid down by General Chiang": piety (as comrades they should love each other), righteousness (as citizens they should be dutiful toward the nation by crushing "the traitors who are… betraying their mother country"), integrity (as heroes they should punish corrupt officials and traitors), and conscientiousness (as patriots they should take steps against not only those traitors who "aimed at securing high positions for themselves and obtaining money for their own pockets" but also those who enjoyed themselves "in dancing, gambling, and other amusements"). The letter concluded: "Kill the enemy and annihilate the traitor!"[161]
The next morning, April 11, the three men reassembled at the head of Juyili Alley, Lloyd Road. Yuan Dechang assigned Peng Fulin to take care of the watchman inside the lane.[162] Zhao Zhixiang was to keep an eye out for police patrolmen.[163] None of them knew that the watchman had already invited the beat patrolman inside his guard post for a cup of tea.[164]
At 9:15, Dr. Xi stepped out of his back door and started down the alley. Yuan Dechang waited in the shadows. As the doctor approached, Yuan stepped in front of him and started firing. 38-caliber dumdum bullets. Peng Fulin simultaneously
Meanwhile, Yuan Dechang and Zhao Zhixiang escaped in separate directions. Zhao Zhixiang made the mistake of returning to the Nanjing Hotel on Shanxi Road, where he stood helplessly by as the badly wounded Peng Fulin stumbled into the hotel lobby supported by a fellow waiter Peng had appealed to for help.[166] Zhao had no choice but to rent three rickshaws and ask to be taken to nearby Paulun (Baolun) Hospital.[167]
When the hospital staff admitted Peng Fulin, they also phoned a gunshot report to Louza Station. By 11 A.M. Shanghai Municipal Police detectives were at Paulun Hospital. Peng Fulin had too deep a chest wound to be interrogated formally, but he did tell the investigators that he had been mysteriously struck by a stray shot along Lloyd Road. Zhao Zhixiang corroborated this fanciful tale at Peng's bedside, and was instantly detained and taken to Louza Road for questioning. Members of the Japanese Military Police attended the interrogation.[168]
While Zhao Zhixiang was being questioned, other Shanghai Municipal Police detectives searched Peng and Zhao's room at 11 Wenxian li, where they found the letter from Zhou Jianhua that incriminated them as members of a Nationalist secret service assassination squad.[169] Confronted with this evidence, Zhao Zhixiang broke down and confessed. At 2:30 that same afternoon the officers took him in handcuffs to Peng Fulin's hospital room, and when Peng—who was in "a very weakened condition" —heard Zhao's confession, he too admitted his complicity. At 3:00 the next morning Peng gave up the struggle and died. For Zhao Zhixiang, a greater ordeal lay ahead.[170]
On April 19, 1939, the Shanghai Municipal Police escorted Zhao Zhixiang across the boundary line at Suzhou Creek and, as a token of their "sincerity," handed Zhao over to the Japanese Military Police. The former tailor's apprentice was never to be seen again.[171]
COLLUSION
There were many more deaths to come—hanjian to be exterminated—in 1940 and 1941, but patriotic terrorism and civil resistance ceased in Shanghai after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The polarized clarity of mutual opposition had by then been blurred by the Nationalist intelligence services' strategy of quxian jiu-guo ("saving the nation in a devious way"): that is, of both overtly working with the enemy's intelligence services and covertly infiltrating thousands of lower-ranking double agents into the puppet Special Work organization.[172] This policy of entwinement, according to mainland Chinese sources, was secretly adopted by
Wang Jingwei's puppet régime was roundly detested.[174]
Wang Kemin's provisional government and Liang Hongzhi's reform government were the senior generation that had formerly operated under the sign "traitor" [jian]. In the occupied zone everyone called them the "former Han traitors" [qianhan]. Naturally enough, Wang Jingwei's collaborationist régime was called the "latter Han traitors" [houhan]. Many of these treacherous scoundrels verbally acknowledged that they were "latter Han traitors" but quite unabashedly saw no cause for shame. But ever since the "latter Han traitors" took the "former Han traitors'" place as Japanese puppets, the people gnashed their teeth and hated them bitterly. This was because the "former" were actually no match for the "latter" in heinousness, especially since the "latter" had their den of monsters at No. 76 (the puppet secret service organ)—the mere mention of which turned one pale—where people were mowed down like fields of hemp.[175]
But Chiang Kai-shek's secret service units colluded with them nonetheless.
For Chiang Kai-shek had given the same orders to the civilian secret service under Chen Lifu and Xu Enzeng (director of Zhongtong, the Central Statistics Bureau). Xu was in direct and personal communication with Ding Mocun, former Zhongtong agent and now one of the heads of the Special Work Headquarters of the Nanjing régime. Whenever clerks in the Zhongtong Code Section in Nationalist Chongqing received a wireless message from Ding's transmitter, they hand-carried it immediately to Director Xu, who deciphered it for his and Chiang Kai-shek's "eyes only."[176]
Dai Li had an identical arrangement with Zhou Fohai, Nanjing's arch hanjian by all Guomindang public accounts. Dai also placed key agents such as Mao Sen (who was captured by the Japanese in occupied Shanghai) in the security services of the Nanjing administration, where their deeds sometimes served Juntong ends, and sometimes served the puppet government—including the arrest, torture, and execution of Chinese patriotic "warriors."[177] Meantime, puppet agents were also infiltrating Juntong on behalf of the Japanese, while Communist spies simultaneously cooperated with the puppets, the Japanese, and the American Office of Strategic Services, just as they also tried to place agents within Military Statistics. As a consequence of this fractured clandestine politics, most of which was totally impenetrable to the public, their ultimate loyalty remained very much in question throughout the war; and despite the extreme polarization between "warriors" and "traitors" there was not quite the same clarity of choice as one could imagine in the case of the French resistance to the Nazis.[178]
For, even though the resistancialist myth was quickly exposed in postwar France, certain fundamental polarities remained. "Whenever any party refers to the Occupation [in France], it invariably touches on the century's central issues:
Historians in China have never fully explored the issue of wartime hanjian.[182] But when Chinese historians do address the subject, they will have to confront the question of clearness of choice, if only to show how motley people's aims were at the time, and how muddled were the distinctions between friend and foe when the agents of at least three seats of government—the Nationalist party-state in Chongqing, the Reform puppet-state in Nanjing, and the Communist rebel-state in Yan'an—competed among themselves for positional advantage in whatever settlement was likely to fall out after the Japanese were defeated.[183]
CONCLUSION
The postwar settlement further clouded the issue, if only because of the carpet-bagging of the Nationalists who took coastal China back from the Japanese. While Chiang Kai-shek assigned the task of sujian (eradicating traitors) to Dai Li, and while many leading "traitors" were tried and killed, a number of prominent collaborators were able to buy their way out of hanjian status on the spurious grounds of, say, having been secret members of Dai Li's Loyal and Patriotic Army (Zhongyi jiuguo jun).[184] Conversely, because of Dai Li's death in an airplane crash in the spring of 1946, those puppets who actually had been in secret communication with Juntong could not call upon General Dai as a witness to their ultimate loyalty when they were tried and sentenced to death for treason.[185]
The truth was that matters were never quite so distinctly drawn as implied by the polarization between "warriors" and "traitors." Many figures, including prominent Communists such as Pan Hannian and Nationalists such as Miao Bin occupied deeply ambiguous positions as they navigated the mined shoals of the wartime period.[186]
Miao, for example, was one of the founders of the Sun Yatsen Study Society at Whampoa in December 1925. Dismissed on corruption charges as Jiangsu chief of police, he returned to his hometown, Wuxi, married the niece of Rong Zongjing (whose son is now vice president of the People's Republic of China), and became chief manager of the magnate's flour mills. In 1937, Miao Bin joined the puppet régime in Beijing, directed the training unit of Wang Jingwei's Youth League (Qingnian xunliansuo), and organized the pro-Japanese New People's Society (Xinminhui). In 1940 he became president of Wang Jingwei's Examination Yuan,
After VJ day, Miao Bin was at first not treated as a war crimes prisoner but rather was placed in protective custody. In April 1946, after clamorous public censure, Miao Bin was put on trial before the Jiangsu Higher Court. About to be judged guilty and sentenced, Miao was suddenly spared when a letter reached the court from Juntong, confirming that Miao had indeed become a special agent of the Military Statistics Bureau in August 1943. Yet, shortly after his release by the Higher Court, Miao Bin was just as suddenly taken back into custody, transported to Suzhou, rushed to trial, and executed as a traitor for reasons that will probably never be fully known.[188]
Such political murkiness is certainly not peculiar to the hanjian of the War of Resistance. What is specific, in a way that may help us understand what it means to become Chinese, is the paradoxical rigidity and flexibility of the boundary between embracing and renouncing allegiance or loyalty to "Chineseness."
Recognizing the problematical nature of allegiance to the Chinese nation-state after eight years of competing wartime régimes plus the civil war's legacy of divided sovereign entities, we can still roughly distinguish between three different modes of disloyalty: betraying one's primal "natural" identity ("you're a traitor to your race"), betraying one's vocation ("you're a traitor to your calling"), and betraying one's cause ("you're a traitor to your word").
Under the Qing dynasty, elite loyalty was mixed: the dynasty could claim primal allegiance from bannermen and demand vocational loyalty from Confucian officials. There was a degree of personalism, of course: the Qianlong emperor could reward loyal bureaucrats and posthumously punish disloyal ministers. But this discrimination publicly eschewed the issue of primal loyalties. The rise of the Tongmenghui revolutionary movement was about just that, though its ideological solution was insufficient to hold a polity together. In Republican China, a different dissolution formed: the strain between loyalty to one's cause and loyalty to one's identity. This was why Wang Jingwei was in such an excruciating position when he lamented the way in which "popular clamor" killed the "true patriots" of the Ming. "High sounding words are anathema, pride kills victory, modesty averts defeat."[189]
A quisling's lament, Wang's words were only persuasive if one ignored the full implications of what it meant to be a hanjian in the mid-twentieth century, a time in Chinese history in which once-universal cultural loyalty retained a central place, along with a particularly contemporary allegiance to folk and race. Identity—the
In other words, Hanness could get you back in, and the slate might be wiped clean. During and after the War of Resistance, it was the Chinese Communist Party's ability to take over the issue of identity—that is, adopt the cloak of Chinese ethnocultural centrality—that helped it win the hearts and minds of the people. The collaboration issue was thereby muted (though it emerged again in the spy scares and witch hunts of the Cultural Revolution), because all one had to do to remain within the vast mass of limin (black-haired people) was to acknowledge Chinese identity and make amends for past lapses "among ourselves": be it departure for abroad, life under a colonial régime, or service to a government in exile.
If the base meaning of treachery, of being a traitor or hanjian, is cultural and ethnic transgression, then political betrayal can be mitigated by primal loyalties, reasserted through cultural and ethnic integration. Outsiders may be put off by thinly veiled hints of this "we-they" division, but members of the Chinese ecumene can take heart in their capacity to let political bygones be bygones. That is why, in the most down-to-earth and current of ways, the authorities in mainland China continue so obdurately to expect, nay demand, eventual reunification with Taiwan. And that is also why Taiwanese exclusiveness—a refusal, in effect, to admit to being "just" Chinese—is viewed by those same mainland authorities as such a baneful threat to the One China that the two major political parties conjure on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
NOTES
Abbreviations
| CWR | China Weekly Review. |
| RDS | Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of China, 1930–1939. Government Documents Library, microfilm 31217, U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland. |
| RWSSZ | Shanghai shi dang'an guan, comp. Ri wei Shanghai shi zhengf u (The Japanese puppet government of Shanghai). Shanghai: Dang'an chubanshe, 1986. SB Shen bao. |
| SMA | Shanghai Municipal Archives. |
| SMP | Shanghai Municipal Police (International Settlement) Files. Microfilms from the U.S. National Archives. |
| WX | Wenxian (Documents). 8 fasc., 2 suppl. Shanghai: Zhonghua daxue tushu youxian gongsi, October 1938 to May 1939. |
I owe thanks to members of the "Becoming Chinese Conference," and especially to Prasenjit Duara and Hsü Ying-shih, and to Jonathan Spence, who served as commentator
1. Luo Zhufeng, ed., Hanyu da cidian [The comprehensive Chinese dictionary], vol. 6 (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1990), 49. The verbally less flamboyant Zhongwen da cidian [The encyclopedic dictionary of the Chinese language] (Taibei: Zhongguo wenhua xueyuan chuban bu, 1967) compiled on Taiwan, whose editor in chief is Zhang Qiyun, defines it as a "term for someone who willingly harms his own country for the benefit of a foreigner" (20:79).
2. Zhang, Zhongwen da cidian, 9:143; Luo, Hanyu da cidian, 4:349.
3. Other related compounds include jianren (artful villain), jianqiao (double-faced, deceptive), jianxi (spy), jianmou (treacherous plot; to plot against), and zuojian (to act the spy). Like hanjian, the term jianxi (with the first form of the character) was first employed widely in the Song dynasty (though the usage can be found in the Jiu Tang shu) to mean a spy employed by the barbarian Jin dynasty. Zhang, Zhongwen da cidian, 9:145.
4. Luo, Hanyu da cidian, 4:268–69. Pronounced gan, it was used in Zuo zhuan as a verb for usurping a king's throne. See also Zhang, Zhongwen da cidian, 9:53.
5. Luo, Hanyu da cidian, 6:49.
6. The ethnic component can be shifted. On Taiwan, one hears the term taijian applied to Taiwanese who do not favor independence.
7. Pamela Kyle Crossley, "An Introduction to the Qing Foundation Myth," Late Imperial China 6, no. 1 (December 1985): 3–24; "Manzhou yuanliu kao and Formalization of the Manchu Heritage," Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 4 (November 1987): 761–90; and Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Joseph Richmond Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968); Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), all passim.
8. In the early fifteenth century, during the Ming, "the battle line [along the southwestern frontier] was drawn not only between barbarians and civilians (min), but also between collaborators and other law-abiding residents." Leo K. Shin, "Contracting Chieftaincy: Political Tribalization of the Southwest in Ming China" (paper presented at the Center for Chinese Studies Annual Symposium, "Empire, Nation, and Region: The Chinese World Order Reconsidered," Berkeley, California, March 3–4, 1995), 37.
9. Usually intermarrying with the Miao, hanjian acted as intermediaries in Miao contacts with Han officials and merchants. Jianmin (treacherous people), however, were the staff members, sergeants, and runners who served as advisors to the hereditary chieftains along the frontier. Donald Sutton, "Sinicizing and Signifying in the Eighteenth Century: Ordering the World of the Ethnic Frontier" (paper presented at the Center for Chinese Studies Annual Symposium, "Empire, Nation, and Region: The Chinese World Order Reconsidered," Berkeley, California, March 3–4, 1995; long version of the paper March 2, 1995, p. 12).
10. Donald Sutton, "Sinicizing and Signifying in the Eighteenth Century: Ordering the World of the Ethnic Frontier" (paper presented at the Center for Chinese Studies Annual Symposium, "Empire, Nation, and Region: The Chinese World Order Reconsidered," Berkeley, California, March 3–4, 1995; short version of the paper March 2, 1995, p. 19). The most interesting aspect of this progression was the latitude afforded to ascriptive officials to deem transgressors as being traitors to the Han.
11. Arthur Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958); Frederic Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
12. Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); Mark Elvin, "Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years," in Zone: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff, pt. 2 (New York: Zone, 1989), 267–349;Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, all passim. There was, to be sure, a "functional" side to this linkage between native treachery and foreign collusion. William C. Kirby has noted, "Efforts to control the internal effects of foreign penetration could take the form of castigating Chinese with foreign connections as traitors." Kirby, "Intercultural Connections and Chinese Development: External and Internal Spheres of Modern China's Foreign Relations," in China's Quest for Modernization: A Historical Perspective, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wang Xi (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1997), 208–33, citation on 215.
13. In vernacular Chinese, han also means "man" and is gendered masculine, as in laohan (old man), hanzi (heman, brave fellow), dahan (big man), and haohan (brave man).
14. Cohen, China and Christianity.
15. SB, 24 December 1938, p. 2:6.
16. Zhongyang zuzhi bu, tewuzu, diaocha ke, ed., "Zhou Enlai cansha Gu Shunzhang jiashu ji yiji fenzi sanshi yu ren maicang Shanghai zujie quyu zhi faxian" [Zhou Enlai's slaughter of Gu Shunzhang's dependents and the discovery of more than thirty deviate elements buried in the Shanghai concession region], Bureau of Investigation Archives document D112(276/7435B/19933), pp. 10 and 336–37; Li Tianmin, Zhou Enlai pingzhuan [A critical biography of Zhou Enlai] (Hong Kong: Youlian yanjiusuo, 1975), 104; Li Zhaochun, "Shenfen fuza de Pan Hannian" [The complicated identities of Pan Hannian], Gongdang wenti yanjiu 9, no. 3 (n.d.): 114–18, citation on 115;Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer, Kang Sheng et les services secrets chinois (1927–1987) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), 105; SMP, D-9319, 1939, pp. 2–3; Shen Zui, Juntong neimu [The inside story of the Military Statistics (Bureau)] (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1984), 64.
17. Shen Zui, Juntong neimu, 92.
18. Ibid., 63–64; Concession Française de Changhai, Direction des Services de Police, Service Politique, Document No. 237/S. Étude—le mouvement communiste en Chine, 1920–1933, Shanghai, December 15, 1933, pp. 40–41.
19. Deng Yuanzhong, Sanminzhuyi Lixingshe shi [A history of the Sanminzhuyi Lixingshe] (Taibei: Sixian chubanshe, 1984), 110.
20. Xu Youwei, "Lixingshe yu Riben (1932–1938 nian)" [The Vigorous Revival Society and Japan, 1932–1938] (paper presented at the Thirteenth International Association of Historians of Asia Conference, Sophia University, Tokyo, September 5–9, 1994), 5; T'ienwei
21. Xu Youwei, "Lixingshe yu Riben," 5. This is the author's synopsis and condensations of a half dozen Lixingshe tracts.
22. Shanghai Municipality Public Security Bureau, Shanghai shi gong'anju yewu baogao [Shanghai Municipality Public Security Bureau report of affairs], vol. 5 (Shanghai: Shanghai Municipality Public Security Bureau, July 1931–June 1932), 54, 84–85, 214.
23. Article translated from Xin wan bao (April 5, 1932), in SMP, D-3445, 5/4/32. See also Tan Shaoliang's April 5 report in the same file.
24. Then, and later in 1937, hundreds of Koreans and Taiwanese came to work for the Japanese special services units in Shanghai. More than a thousand Koreans were settled in surrounding farmlands. Again, the linkage between hanjian and the alien was reinforced.
25. Tan Shaoliang's report, "Citizen's Maintenance Association," SMP, D3445, 5/4/32, pp. 4–5; and D. S. Golder to Special Branch, SMP, D-3445, 7/4/32; Emily Honig, "The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican-Era Shanghai," Modern China 15, no. 3 (July 1989): 243–274; Emily Honig, "Creating Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai," Modern China 15, no. 3 (July 1989): 26; Emily Honig, "Migrant Culture in Shanghai: In Search of a Subei Identity" (n.p., n.d.), p. 10.
26. Article translated from Xin wan bao in SMP, D-3445, 27/4/32.
27. Feng denounced Chiang Kai-shek's government for failing to resist the Japanese. Howard L. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967–1971, 1979), 42.
28. Deng Yuanzhong, Sanminzhuyi Lixingshe shi, 110. Chiang actually declared domestic pacification the priority in a speech on July 23, 1931, after the Guangdong-Guangxi clique denounced Party Center. Ibid., 126–27.
29. Parks M. Coble, "Super-Patriots and Secret Agents: The Blue Shirts and Japanese Secret Services in North China" (paper presented at the Center for Chinese Studies Regional Seminar, Berkeley, 21 March 1987), 18.
30. Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" [Dai Li and the Military Statistics Bureau], in Zhejiang wenshi ziliao xuanji, ed. Wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, fasc. 23, Neibu publication (Zhejiang: Renmin chubanshe, 1982), 137.
31. Gan Guoxun, "Guanyu suowei ‘Fuxingshe’ de zhenqing shikuang" [The true conditions and actual circumstances of the so-called Fuxingshe], Zhuanji wenxue, xia, 35, no. 5 (November 1979): 83.
32. Haruke Keiin [Yasutane], Shanghai tero kōsaku 76 gō [Working it out in Shanghai's Number 76] (Tokyo: Mainichi shimbun sha, 1980), 33–35;Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991), 228. According to Thomas Chao, a State Department informant, the Blue Shirts had gained control of "municipal and provincial police organizations in the capital and in important places throughout the country…. They practically dominate the armed forces of the government." "Blueshirts Organization," report from
33. The shangtuan was formed in February 1937.
34. "Shanghai Special Service Corps Arrest," report by Detective Sergeant Pitt, in SMP, D-8039a, 25/10/37, p. 1.
35. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," in SMP, D-8635, 24/7/38, p. 7. The deputy chief was Liang Tongfang.
36. Wang, born outside Ningbo, was the son of a captain in the Republican Army. After primary school in his village, he attended Nanjing Middle School for three years. Then, through an uncle's introduction, he was apprenticed to a machine factory in Pudong, where he had lived and worked until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. He went to the Guandi Temple in response to the newspaper notice, and was posted to Sun Yaxing's section. "Deposition of Wong Tz Koo," in SMP, D-8635, 27/7/38, p. 1. Jiang, born in Nanjing, was the son of a Jinjiang shop assistant. He attended primary school in Jinjiang and then boarded at Shanghai Middle School (Nandao) where he studied Chinese literature from March 1936 to June 1937. The day he left school to move in with a friend of his father, he bought a copy of Central Daily News and saw the advertisement. He enrolled in the association without telling his mother. SMP, D-8597, 22/7/38, pp. 1–2. Zhou, a native of Chongming, where he received an elementary education, came to Shanghai by himself at the age of fourteen (fifteen sui) to serve an apprenticeship at a printing press in the French Concession. He worked in four different printing shops before becoming a printer at the Zhongguo dabao (China herald). "Deposition of Tsou Sue Kong," in SMP, D-8635, 26/7/38, p. 1.
37. CWR, 19 February 1938, p. 321.
38. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 8–9; SMP, D-8597, 2–3; "Deposition of Wong Tz Koo," 1–2; "Deposition of Tsou Sue Kong," 2.
39. Wang Fangnan, "Wo zai Juntong shisinian de qinli he jianwen" [What I experienced and learned about during my fourteen years in the MSB], in Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Editorial Committee, ed., Wenshi ziliao xuanji [Selections of historical materials], fasc. 107 (zong) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1987), 144–45; Xu Zhucheng, Du Yuesheng zhengzhuan [A straightforward biography of Du Yuesheng] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang sheng xinhua shudian, 1982), 95; Zhu Zuotong and Mei Yi, eds., Shanghai yi ri [One day in Shanghai], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Huamei chuban gongsi, 1938), 133–36.
40. "Emergency Period Service Group Report," SMP, D-8039a, 23/9/37, pp. 1–2; SMP, D-8039A, 10/9/37, p. 1, and D-8615, 22/9/39, p. 1; Xu Zhucheng, Du Yuesheng zhengzhuan, 100.
41. Fu Duoma, twenty-seven years old and a native of Dinghai, joined the Special Action Corps on August 20, 1937—the very day the Public Security Bureau requested help from the Shanghai Municipal Police in arresting Chinese "traitors" believed to have poisoned public tea urns (a belief that aroused mobs on August 17 to beat several suspects to death). After hostilities had broken out on August 13, Fu Duoma had moved into the closed-down Xinguang Primary School (of which he was the former principal) at Changxingli in Zhabei. Fu was arrested by the police on September 16, 1937. SMP, D-8039A, 22/8/37, 26/8/37, and 10/9/37, passim. "[After the August 1937 bombings] patriotism in its most drastic guise ran through the city like fire in the form of ‘traitor hunts'; any poor wretch
42. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 3–4; Emily Hahn, China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1944), 54–55.
43. Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" 100–101; Shen Zui, "Wo suo zhidao de Dai Li" [The Dai Li I knew], in Shen Zui and Wen Qiang, Dai Li qi ren [Dai Li the man] (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1980), 21–22; "Special Service Corps Arrest," 3;Xu Zhucheng, Du Yuesheng zhengzhuan, 99; Haruke Keiin, Shanghai tero kōsaku 76 gō, 48–50.
44. Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" 100–101.
45. SMP, D-8039a, 10/9/37.
46. "Deposition of Wong Tz Koo," 1–2; "Deposition of Tsou Sue Kong," 1–2; "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 9–10.
47. Xu Zhucheng, Du Yuesheng zhengzhuan, 100.
48. Ibid., 100–101.
49. Edgar Snow, The Battle for Asia (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1942), 52. See also Zhu Zuotong and Mei Yi, Shanghai yi ri, 1:101–11.
50. "Woosung-Shanghai Special Chinese Corps Leaves Shanghai," Da mei wanbao, 1 February 1938. Translated in SMP, D-8039A, 4/2/38, pp. 6.
51. RWSSZ, 1–2 (see also the first illustration in the frontispiece, a photographic copy of the founding announcement); Lynn White, "Non-governmentalism in the Historical Development of Modern Shanghai," in Urban Development in Modern China, ed. Laurence J. C. Ma and Edward W. Hanten (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), 48.
52. Su Xiwen, forty-seven years old, was originally from Amoy and had been head of the Fujian Finance Bureau. RWSSZ, 13. Note, however, that Boyle and Zhu Zijia identify him as being brought over to Shanghai from Taiwan by the Japanese army. John Hunter Boyle, China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 112; Zhu Zijia [Jin Xiongbai], Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang [The beginning and end of the drama of the Wang régime], vol. 4 (Hong Kong: Chunqiu zazhi she, 1961), 32;Robert Barnett, Economic Shanghai: Hostage to Politics, 1937–1941 (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), 19.
53. This was also the symbol on the flag of the Xinminhui (New People's Society), which trained cadres and promoted the "kingly way" (ōdō or wangdao) of Confucianism on behalf of the provisional government in north China. The Xinminhui was patterned after the Manchurian Xiehehui (Concordia Society), used by General Kita Seiichi (the foremost "puppeteer" in north China) as part of the baojia of the North China Area Army's special services units and the system of local control by the Peace Preservation Committees. The Xinminhui's president, Miao Bin, also emphasized Buddhism as the common heritage of China and Japan. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 85, 91–94; George Edward Taylor, The Struggle for North China (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), 72–74. As Prasenjit Duara shows, some of these "modern redemptive societies" dated back to the second decade of the twentieth century and drew upon gentry syncretism. Others, such as the Yellow Way Society (Huangdaohui), enrolled former gangsters and engaged in assassinations and bombings on behalf of the Japanese. Prasenjit Duara, "Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of Middle-Class Women in Modern China" (paper prepared for the conference "Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity
54. SMA, Wang 1.1.10—Dadao file, cover sheet dated in both lunar and solar (24 February 1938) figures—" Jingchaju xiang zhangze" [Rules and regulations of the Police Bureau], pp. 2, 5–7. Cleaning up bodies and debris after the Japanese invasion was how the puppet régime of "traitors" (hanjian) commenced as well in 1932 in Shanghai. Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 4:32;Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 197. See also RDS, 893.00 P.R. Shanghai/117 June 1938, p. 15. Photographs of the flag are to be found in the frontispiece photographs in RWSSZ, and in CWR, 8 January 1938, p. 152. To justify its rule, the puppet government accused both the GMD and Chinese Communist Party of spreading civil war across the country and promised to restore peace and tranquillity. RWSSZ, 6.
55. SMA, Wang 1.1.10, pp. 5, 9b, 18, 24a. The head of the public health section was Fan Jimin, thirty-six sui, who had a degree in medicine from the Zhejiang Specialized Medical School (yiyao zhuanmen xuexiao). He had been head of the Songjiang county hospital. SMA, Wang 1.1.58—Dadao file (April 1938)— "Guanyu jingju neiwai yuanjing" [Long-term perspectives for the police], pp. 2b. The chief advisor for the detective squad was Li Jinbiao, a gangster who had been a detective in the Song-Hu police department (Song-Hu jingcha ting). Li was later assassinated by Nationalist agents on October 28, 1939. SB, 29 October 1939, p. 9. For an organizational chart of the Dadao government, see RWSSZ, 3–5.
56. RWSSZ, 12.
57. Ibid.
58. SMA, Wang 1.1.58—Dadao file— "Guanyu jingju neiwai yuanjing," pp. 19. There is a complete roster of the Dadao police bureau for March 1938 in SMA, Wang 1.1.226— Dadao file— "Jingchaju sanyuefen qingce" [Police roster in March]. The inspectorate (including Chief Inspector Liu Wanqing and Chief Investigator Xu Wenbing) is listed in SMA, Wang 1.1.34—Dadao file— "Jingchaju weiren ji renmian" [Police department appointments and dismissals], pp. 66a; and other important positions (Hu Zhenggu, head of the Detective Brigade, and his deputy, Huo Liangchen) are noted in SMA, Wang 1.1.29— Dadao file— "Jingchaju cunren" [Police department personnel assignments], pp. 2b–3b. When people heard the term "Dadao Municipal Government" (Dadao shi zhengfu), they invariably smiled, because dao4 (way) was a homophone for the character dao4 (robber), making the phrase mean "the Municipal Government of the Big Robbers." Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 4:32.
59. For lists of these municipal officials, along with records of their turpitudes, see WX, vol. 2 (10 November 1938): E42–E44.
60. Wang Zihui later served as minister of industry (shiye buzhang) in the reform government. Qin Xiaoyi, Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian—Dui Ri zhanzheng shiqi [Initial compilation of important historical documents of the Republic of China—The period of the war with Japan], Di liu bian: Kuilei zuzhi [pt. 6: Puppet organizations] (Taibei: Zhongguo Guomindang dangshi weiyuanhui, 1981), 139.
61. Cao Zhenwei, "Liang Hongzhi," in Wang wei shi hanjian [Ten Wang puppet traitors], ed. Huang Meizhen (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1986), 406–7; Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 5:108–9. For an intimate and artfully written portrait of Liang, see Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 4:36–37. Liang Hongzhi was born in Changle (Fujian) in 1881. His grandfather, the eminent scholar Liang Zhangju (jinshi,
62. "Weixin zhengfu zuzhi xitong ji zhongyao zhiyuan biao" [Table of organization and important personnel of the reform government], in Zhonghua minguo weixin zhengf u zhenggang [Political program of the Chinese National Reform Government] (Nanjing: Zhonghua lianhe Tongxun she, 10 September 1939), attachment to p. 311; Qin Xiaoyi, Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian, 127–28, 132–38; Nashimoto Yuhei, Chūgoku no naka no Nihonjin [The Japanese in China], vol. 2 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1958), 65–74; Liu Qikui, "Wang Kemin," in Wang wei shi hanjian [Ten Wang puppet traitors], ed. Huang Meizhen (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1986), 342–43; Israel Epstein, The Unfinished Revolution in China (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947), 315; T.K. Koo, "Some Economic Documents Relating to the Genesis of the Japanese-Sponsored Régime in North China," Far Eastern Quarterly 6, no. 1 (November 1946): 66;Boyle, China and Japan at War, 88–89 and 110–11; F.C. Jones, Japan's New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937–45 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 72; Imai Takeo, Shina jihen no kaisō [Reminiscences of the China Incident] (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 1964), 282–83. Wang Kemin's government, it was said, was composed of "tired retired old scoundrels, forgotten petty warlords, people who have been smoking opium for the past ten years." Emily Hahn, The Soong Sisters (New York: Double-day, Doran, and Company, 1941), 306.
63. Zhonghua minguo weixin zhengf u zhenggang, 1. See also Qin Xiaoyi, Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian, 140–41. For the "cleansing of villages" policy, see Qin Xiaoyi, Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian, 142–43; Huang Meizhen, ed., Wei ting yin ying lu—Dui Wang wei zhengquan de huiyi jishi [Chronicles of the secret shadows of the puppet court— records of the memoirs of the puppet Wang régime] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chuban-she, 1991), 52–53.
64. Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 4:33. The reform government initially operated out of the New Asia Hotel in Hongkou because the Japanese army had commandeered most important government buildings in Nanjing. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 112.
65. SMP, D-8155D, 30/3/38, p. 1. "The real masters," Franz Michael has pointed out, "are the Japanese Special Service Bureau and the Military Police." Michael, "The Significance of Puppet Governments," Pacific Affairs Pro 4 (December 1939): 400–412.
66. RWSSZ, 18–20. For the regulations governing the relationship between the Nanjing central government and the Shanghai Special Municipality (Shanghai tebie shi), see Zhonghua minguo weixin zhengf u zhenggang, 79–80; and RWSSZ, 18–19. The Supervisory Yamen was not even powerful enough to find office quarters in Shanghai. In October 1938 its representatives were still hunting, having discovered that "the most suitable accommodations [had] already been preempted by the Japanese authorities." RDS, 893.00 P.R. Shanghai/121, October 1938, p. 15.
67. RWSSZ, 31, 38. For the organization of the Shanghai Special Municipality government, see ibid., 43–45; and SB, 15 October 1938, p. 10.
68. Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, 25 November 1938, p. 1, in SMP, D-8870, 25/11/38. Su Xiwen led a delegation of ten puppet officials, accompanied by ten Japanese military and special services officers, to Tokyo. WX, vol. 3 (10 December 1938): F40.
69. Fu's original name was Zongyao. He was from Zhenhai (Zhejiang), and had been a client of the warlord Sun Chuanfang. He was also head of the board of directors of the Shanghai French Commercial Tramway Company (Shanghai Fashang dianche gongsi). Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" 138.
70. Percy Finch, Shanghai and Beyond (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 312.
71. See, for an example of this puppet master imagery, "Wan kuilei ju kaimu" [Puppet show opens in Anhui], describing the Japanese ensconcement of a puppet government in Anhui on October 28, 1938. SB, 4 November 1938, p. 2b. When the resistance press reported that such-and-such a puppet had "taken power," the term invariably used was dengchang (coming on stage). See, for example, WX, vol. 6 (10 March 1939): D80.
72. Wen Jingdao, "Saochu yimin qi" [Sweeping out the energy of the recluses], SB, 12 October, 1938, p. 4:16. Elsewhere in this volume, Pickowicz points out that most collaborators were presented as being "foreign" in terms of their dress and behavior. They participated in "an alien, capitalist culture of merchants" that denied people "their essential Chineseness."
73. Ding San, "Xianshizhuyizhe" [Realists], SB, 19 November 1938, p. 4:16.
74. Stanley Hoffman's foreword to Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome is relevant in this regard. "What [Rousso] shows, explicitly and vividly, is how the French chose to believe that Vichy had been the creation of a small group of rather wicked (but still more misguided than evil) men, that the crimes committed were crimes of the Germans and of very small bands of collaborationists, and that most of the population had resisted the Occupation in some degree." Stanley Hoffmann, foreword to The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, by Henry Rousso, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), viii.
75. The letters appeared a little more than a month after the United Front journal Wenxian reported that Wang Zuntong and her sisters had failed to keep their father, Wang Kemin, from serving as the head of the Beiping puppet régime. Subsequently, Zuntong had fled from the side of "this hanjian," abandoning the "spiritual prison" of her father's household to seek refuge in Hong Kong, where she planned to devote her energies to the nation and the people. WX, vol. 1 (10 October 1938): D69. Wartime propaganda repeatedly adjured wives and daughters to keep their menfolk from becoming collaborators: "Not only do we personally swear not to be hanjian, we also want to exhort our parents and brothers, our husbands and sons, our relatives and our friends not to do work that is harmful to our progeny and our people. We want to do [whatever is needed to make sure that] all around us there is not a single trace of hanjian." Funü wenxian supplement to WX, vol. 7 (April 1939): 3.
76. Jian means "hard, firm, steadfast, determined."
77. The Maintenance Association, which was usually congruent with the Self-Government Association (Zizhihui), was the local collaborationist law-and-order entity. For lists of local Maintenance Association members in a dozen Jiangsu counties—a presentation that invited assassination—see WX, vol. 2 (10 November 1938): E44–E45.
78. Ye Shan, "Wo shi yige zhanshi le" [I'm a warrior now], SB, 18 November 1938, p. 4:14.
79. The resistance press vaunted examples of "heroines" (nü yingxiong) such as Cai Yifei, the Lake Tai woman warrior who was killed in battle by Japanese bayonets. WX, vol. 3 (10 December 1938): F47. See also the supplement, Funü wenxian, vol. 7 (April 1939): 18–19, 23–24.
80. This is a variant of the saying, "Murder someone with a borrowed knife" (jie dao sha ren)—that is, use someone else to kill an adversary.
81. The term for this minute fraction is chana, a Buddhist term from the Sanskrit kshana.
82. Ye Shan, "Wo shi yige zhanshi le," SB, 19 November 1938, p. 4:16.
83. Ibid.
84. The theme of ghosts and demons, or of tigers and their attendant chang, was prevalent in anti-Japanese and antipuppet propaganda. In a poster put up by the Guoji fan qinglüe yundong dahui Zhongguo fenhui (Chinese Branch of the International Anti-Aggression Movement Society) in 1938, there is a portrayal of a Chinese avenger thrusting a torch in the face of a tiger-monster thrown back against a heap of its victims' skeletons. Frontispiece to WX, vol. 3 (10 December 1938).
85. The resistance press published as many examples it could find of sons renouncing their fathers for "turning traitor for personal gain" (maiguo qiurong). This was called "extinguishing family relationships for a greater cause" (dayi mieqin). WX, vol. 3 (10 December 1938): F47.
86. Ye Shan, "Wo shi yige zhanshi le," p. 4:14.
87. WX, vol. 3 (10 December 1938): F11. "Wavering elements" could be kept in place in occupied China and used as informants or secret agents by the United Front. Ibid., vol. 5, 10 February 1939, B38.
88. A chang is the hungry ghost of a person eaten by a tiger who urges the tiger to eat others so that his or her soul may be freed.
89. WX, vol. 5 (10 February 1939): D11. The repetition in this announcement of phrases such as sangxin bingkuang could be a matter of the government picking up then-current phrases to describe traitors, or it could suggest that the letters to Jian were actually written by government propagandists, who were probably men. Although the authenticity of the "Jian letters" is dubious, the movement of these stock phrases from government to populace and back again—a characteristic of good propaganda—is certain.
90. Ibid.
91. Wang's followers invariably described their becoming collaborators as "joining the peace movement" (canjia heping yundong). During his October 21, 1946, war crimes trial, Zhou Fohai told the court: "At that time we exerted ourselves to carry out the peace movement because we wanted to help the people out of their suffering in the Occupied Zones. It was not to conspire with the enemy or to oppose our country." SW, 156.
92. For a sensitive portrait of Wang Jingwei as an ambivalent collaborator hoping to be a patriot to the end, see Boyle, China and Japan at War, 350–51.
93. Wang Jingwei detested hanjian. In March 1937, after seeing Chinese puppet troops in action in Suiyuan, Wang declared, "When China was invaded in the past, it often happened that the despicable acts of traitors rather than the aggression of aliens inflicted the most deadly blow upon the country. That Chinese should be unfaithful to their own people is a disgraceful stain on the pages of our history, and if such humiliating acts should be repeated China would suffer early extinction." Lawrence K. Rosinger, "Wang Ching-wei— the Technique of a Traitor," Amerasia 4, no. 6 (August 1940): 271.
94. Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 1:91.
95. Ibid., 92.
96. Ibid.
97. SW, 277. Chu's altruism, however, has to be placed alongside the financial killing this popular health promoter made after his stint as foreign minister when his sister, Chen Bijun (Mme. Wang), got him appointed governor of Guangdong. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 279–80.
98. SW, 583.
99. Lit. Yan Huang—Emperors Yan and Huang.
100. Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 4: ii–iii.
101. WX, vol. 5 (10 February 1939): D11;vol. 8 (10 May 1939): B17.
102. WX, vol. 5 (10 February 1939): B38. Fang Renzhi's father, Yanchu, was secretary of the puppet Self-Government Association (Zizhihui) of Qingpu. In July 1938, Renzhi ran the following notice in the Hankou Dagong bao: "My father returned to Qingpu after the National Army left Shanghai for the west, and occupied an important post in the Maintenance Association [Weichihui]. Renzhi has repeatedly reproved him to no avail…. This kind of behavior is shameless. Not only does it harm the country, it also brings disgrace upon the family. Now, because Renzhi is unwilling to be the descendant of a hanjian, he is placing in the newspaper this respectful warning to relatives and friends. From this day on Renzhi completely breaks off father-son relations (this does not extend to his mother). He is willing as well to contribute his service to the country in order to wipe away this oppressive humiliation." Ibid., vol. 1, 10 October 1938, D69.
103. Ibid., vol. 3, 10 December 1938, H14.
104. Ibid., vol. 510 February 1939, B38.
105. Ibid., vol. 8, 10 May 1939, E23–E24.
106. Hanjian and "treacherous merchants" (jianshang) were engaged in smuggling rice along the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. SB, 3 December 1938, p. 2:7. High rice prices were blamed upon "underhanded control of the rice market by certain traitorous merchants who, in conspiracy with the Japanese and puppet authorities, are making handsome profits." SMP, D-8039, 7/3/39, p. 1.
107. Contemporaries frequently used the term duhua to refer to the poisoning of China with heroin and opium as part of a Japanese and puppet plot to weaken the Chinese race. See, for example, the article, "Duhua Jiashan" (Poisoning Jiashan), which describes the opium sales bureau set up by the Japanese and the puppet magistrate in the county seat. SB, 22 November 1938, p. 2:7; M. S. Bates, "The Narcotics Situation in Nanking and Other Occupied Areas," Amerasia 3, no. 11 (January 1940): 525–27; WX, vol. 1 (20 October 1938): D43; vol. 2 (10 November 1938): E40; and vol. 3 (10 December 1938): F43. The Chongqing authorities accused the Japanese of encouraging this drug abuse for three reasons: (1) revenue; (2) maintaining the livelihoods of undesirable Japanese and Korean elements, thereby keeping them out of Japan; and (3) weakening Chinese wartime resistance by poisoning the people. Joyce Ann Madancy, "Propaganda versus Practice: Official Involvement in the Opium Trade in China, 1927–1945" (master's thesis, Cornell University, 1983), 29–30, 33. The connection between drugs and treachery was obvious to the Japanese. "Spies were generally gangsters. Bright gangsters. Paper money had no value for them. They wanted opium. In big cities or large villages there were always pariahs. We'd find them and train them, threaten them, cajole them. We'd tell them, ‘If you take the wrong course we'll kill you, but if you do what you're told you'll have to build warehouses to hold your fortune.’ Then we'd bring out the opium. ‘I'll do it!’ they'd say in a minute." Statement by Uno Shintaro,
108. Hanjian, serving as district officials in Songjiang, were described as increasing taxes, collecting all the white rice, and extorting money and goods from the peasants and townsfolk. SB, 26 November 1938, p. 2:7. When Wang Zihui, the reform government's minister of trade and industry (shiye buzhang), returned from an economics conference in Tokyo, he was described in the Shanghai press as having gone "to sell out the people's interests" (chu mai minzu liyi). SB, 6 December 1938, p. 3:10.
109. WX, vol. 1 (10 October 1938): D51.
110. Ibid., D49–D50; and vol. 2 (10 November 1938): E41–E42. The newspaper also published a list of the "excesses" committed by these "dogs" in order to ridicule them: the governor of Jiangsu ordering everyone to worship Confucius on the grounds that Confucius was the teacher of "Oriental culture" (Dongfang wenhua), the mayor of Haining conducting a lantern procession and shouting, "Long live great Japan! Long live the reform government!" and so forth. Ibid., vol. 2 (10 November 1938): E44–E46.
111. Ibid., vol. 5 (10 February 1939): D59, and vol. 7 (10 April 1939): D82.
112. Ibid., vol. 6 (10 March 1939): D80, and vol. 7 (10 April 1939): D83–D86.D88–D89.
113. At the same time, Wenxian published lists of "eliminated traitors" (chujian), who were typically local Maintenance Association heads assassinated by Nationalist death squads. See ibid., vol. 2 (10 November 1938): E46;vol. 3 (10 December 1938): F41–F42;vol. 5 (10 February 1939): D59–D60;vol. 6 (10 March 1939): D80; and vol. 7 (10 April 1939): D84.
114. RWSSZ, 63–64.
115. British Foreign Office Records, Her Majesty's Public Record Office, London, FO371–24663; Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" 138–39; Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, China: Internal Affairs, 1940–1944, 893.00 P.R. (Political Reports)/Shanghai, 145, October 1940, p. 15; CWR, 11 October 1940, p. 168. A fifty thousand dollar reward was put on Zhu's head, and the Japanese launched a manhunt throughout all of occupied China, but Zhu was never caught. RWSSZ, 64–65; Cheng Shuwei and Liu Fuxiang, Daoguang jianying: Minguo ansha jishi [The glint and flash of cold steel: An actual record of assassinations during the Republic] (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1989), 168–74.
116. The impact of terrorism on collaborators living in Shanghai was severe. Zhou Fohai compared the fear of air raids in Chongqing with the dread of terrorism in Shanghai: "Plainly speaking, a man of my standing would have been safe anywhere [in Chongqing] in case of air raids, being provided with the strongest of bombproof dugouts…. My life [in Shanghai in 1939] is constantly being threatened by the Communists and the ‘special service’ element of the Chongqing régime. As there is no warning of an approaching assassination…, I think the danger to life created by these terrorists is much more serious than a Japanese air raid." Boyle, China and Japan at War, 261.
117. For the same reason, Chen Lifu and Chen Guofu also ordered Wu Kaixian, in the summer of 1939, to clear up the party "underground organization" in Shanghai. Wu established the Shanghai Party Political Unification Committee (Shanghai dang zheng tongyi weiyuanhui), and through Du Yuesheng secured the help of the racketeer Huang Jinrong to curb or eliminate collaborationist elements. Jiang Shaozhen, "Du Yuesheng," in Minguo renwu zhuan [Biographies of Republican personages], ed. Li Xin and Sun Sibai, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1978), 317.
118. Wang Fangnan, "Wo zai Juntong shisinian de qinli he jianwen" [What I experienced and learned during my fourteen years in the MSB]. In Chinese People's Political Consultative
119. More than forty Japanese military officers were also shot down. Chen Gongshu, Yingxiong wuming: Beiguo chujian [Anonymous heroes: Weeding out traitors in north China], pt. 1 (Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1941), 10. There were other operations conducted by the Guomindang's civilian secret service, the Central Statistics Bureau, or Zhongtong, quite apart from Dai Li's organization. Huang Meizhen and Zhang Yun, Wang Jingwei guomin zhengf u chengli [The establishment of the Wang Jingwei National Government] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1984), 297. "Was Juntong more active than Zhongtong in occupied areas? They were both active. Was there more coordination between Juntong and Zhongtong in occupied areas than in free areas? We did not want them to know one another. In case one system was exposed, the other would be exposed also [if there were coordination]. In underground work in enemy areas it is better to keep two systems separate." "Ting Mots'un, Chün-t'ung, and Chung-t'ung during the War," 1, in Ch'en Li-fu Materials (Materials relating to the oral history of Mr. Ch'en Li-fu, done with Miss Julie Lien-ying How as part of the Chinese Oral History Project of the East Asian Institute of Columbia University between December 1958 and July 2, 1968).
120. Jonathan Spence, "Goodfellas in Shanghai," New York Review of Books 45, no. 9 (May 28, 1998): 36–38 passim.
121. Hung Wu, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 168–69.
122. Transl. in ibid., 190.
123. After joining Sun Yatsen's group, Shi—who was from Panyu—made three attempts to blow Deshou up. He was caught and executed on the third try. Edward S. Krebs, "Assassination in the Republican Revolutionary Movement," Ch'ing-shih went'i 4, no. 6 (December 1981): 49–50. "Political assassination is a form of death that occurs suddenly to an individual who is involved in politics as the result of covert planning by one or more individuals." Daniel Tretiak, "Political Assassinations in China, 1600–1968," in Assassination and Political Violence: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, ed. James F. Kirkham, Sheldon G. Levy, and William J. Crotty (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 637.
124. Yang, who wrote Xin Hunan (New Hunan), the chief manifesto of Huang Xing's China Revival Society (Huaxing hui), believed, "In reconstructing society, we cannot simply reorganize the old society. We must destroy the old society and cleanse it." Krebs, "Assassination in the Republican Revolutionary Movement," 53–54.
125. Ibid., 45, 55.
126. Tretiak, "Political Assassinations in China," 644. Although rumor had it that Wang Jingwei was spared execution because his handsome looks captivated the empress, a likelier explanation is that the Japanese secretly intervened to prevent his death. As far as the public knew, Prince Su, president of the Board of Civil Administration, was moved by Wang's passionate statement of his motives to reduce the sentence to life imprisonment. Prince Su subsequently visited the prisoner in his cell. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 17–18; Barbara Brooks, "Spies and Adventurers: Kawashima Yoshiko" (paper presented at the Center for Chinese Studies Regional Seminar, Berkeley, 21 March 1987), 2–3.
127. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 13.
128. Zhao Liang, thirty-four years old, was a native of Hangzhou. He had worked as a cardboard box maker for twelve years in Nandao before war broke out in 1937, and he volunteered to serve under Sun Yaxing. "Deposition of Zau Liang," in SMP, D-8635, 26/7/38. Microfilms from the U.S. National Archives, p. 1.
129. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 13–14.
130. Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" 132; "Deposition of Wong Tz Koo," 2.
131. SMP, D-8597, 22/7/38, pp. 7–8; "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 15.
132. "Deposition of Zau Liang," 2. Jiang Haisheng said that they were explicitly told that they had to carry out Sun's assassination orders directly. SMP, D-8597, 22/7/38, p. 8.
133. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 15–16.
134. "Deposition of Tsou Sue Kong," 1–2; "Deposition of Zau Liang," 2–3.
135. Alias Chen Yuanliang, he was a native of Shanghai whose parents came from Guangdong. His father was a private watchman in the French Concession. "Deposition of Zong Kwei Kong," in SMP, D-8635, 25/7/38. p. 1.
136. Ibid., 2.
137. Ibid., 3; "Deposition of Zau Liang," 3–5.
138. RDS, 893.102 S/1654, 11 July 1938.
139. Ibid., 9–10.
140. "Deposition of Sung Yah Shing," 27.
141. WX, fasc. 6 (March 10, 1939): D-81.
142. "Further Assistance to Japanese Military Police," report by D. S. I. Crighton, in SMP, D-9037, 18/3/39, pp. 5–7.
143. "Deposition of Dan Pau Nyi," in SMP, D-9037, 3/11/39, pp. 3–4; "Deposition of Ping Foh Chang," in SMP, D-9037, 3/11/39, pp. 3–4; "Further Assistance to Japanese Military Police," 7–8; "Assassination of Reformed Government Official," Miscellaneous Report no. 89/39, dated February 19, 1939, in SMP (International Settlement) Files, D-9037, 9/11/39, pp. 4–6; "How the Foreign Minister Was Assassinated,"Xin shenbao, November 9, 1939, translated in SMP, D-9037, 9/11/39;Wen-hsin Yeh, "Dai Li and the Liu Geqing Affair: Heroism in the Chinese Secret Service during the War of Resistance," Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 3 (August 1989): 551;Yeh, "The Liu Geqing Affair: Heroism in the Chinese Secret Service during the War of Resistance" (paper presented to the Regional Seminar, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 21 March 1987), 23; China Post, 21 February 1939, p. 1; North China Daily News, 21 February 1939, p. 1; Shanghai Times, 21 February 1939, p. 1; CWR, 25 February 1939, p. 3.
144. CWR, 4 March 1939, p. 12. See also WX, vol. 7 (10 April 1939): D90.
145. Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
146. Regulations of the Shanghai People's Mobilization Society enclosed in Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers, 1939, Volume 4, the Far East, the Near East, and Africa (16 May 1939) U.S. Department of State. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), pp. 50–51.
147. CWR, 11 March 1939, p. 48; SB, 28 February 1939, p. 11; and 7 March 1939, p. 11. Zhu, a graduate of the Baoding Military Academy who had served the Beiyang warlords, was one of the leading officials in the Finance Bureau (Caizheng ju) of the Dadao régime. Members of the Liang Hongzhi reform government had been promised generous payments to their family survivors should they fall prey to terrorists' guns. CWR, 4 March 1939, pp. 10, 47.
148. SB, 12 April 1939, p. 10.
149. He was a native of Suzhou. During his period of study at the Tokyo Ika Daigaku, Dr. Xi had taken a Japanese wife. In Shanghai she became the senior of his two concubines, the principal wife and other concubine being Chinese. Ibid.; SMP, D-9122, 4/11/39.
150. According to Shen bao, Dr. Xi's eldest son, Xingzhi, was in charge of a special radio broadcasting station "engaged in spreading strange reports" and acting as an agent on behalf of Japan. SB, 12 April 39, p. 10.
151. Tairiku shimpo, 12 April 1939, translated in SMP, D-9122, 13/4/39.
152. Yuan's native place was either Songjiang or Kunshan. He was described as being about five and a half feet tall with "thin build, thin face, pale complexion, long hair brushed back, wears foreign clothes, no hat, speaks Shanghai dialect." SMP, D-9122, 15/4/39, pp. 2–3.
153. Peng, who was from Liyang, recalled first meeting Yuan and Zhao at the Wing On (Yongan) Department Store roof garden. Ibid., 12/4/39. Zhao Zhixiang later told the police, however, that he had known Peng before the war broke out in Shanghai, and that Peng (who was then a waiter at the Dadong xin lüguan) and he would often rent a room with a couple of friends to play mahjongg. Ibid., 11/4/39. Peng, who most likely was a trained Juntong agent, also later told the police that he had just happened to bump into Yuan Dechang outside a Chinese movie theater on Avenue Edward VII on April 7, and that he had told Yuan that he had no interest in participating in "patriotic activities."
154. Ibid., 11/4/39.
155. Zhao had met Yuan in the first place through a Pudong guerrilla section chief surnamed Zhang, who had defected to the Japanese in January 1939. Ibid., 11/4/39.
156. Ibid. The telephone operator was probably an agent of Juntong, which had an excellent telephone and telegraph monitoring section, and which often used Shanghai hotels as listening posts. Shen Zui, Juntong neimu [The inside story of the Military Statistics (Bureau)] (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1984), 46–47. The operator in this case, one Pu Fuxin, was interrogated by the Shanghai Municipal Police after the assassination and released. The Japanese Consular Police later claimed that he was a key figure in the assassination ring, but even with the help of the Shanghai Municipal Police they were unable to run him down. SMP, D-9122, 13/4/39, p. 1, and 12/5/39, p. 1.
157. Zhao's account of this haphazard encounter is dubious. The letter from Zhou Jianhua (see below), later found by the police in Peng Fulin's hotel room at the Nanjing Hotel, referred to an earlier "matter" that Yuan, Peng, and Zhao had successfully carried out, strongly suggesting that Zhao had worked together with the other two Juntong agents in an earlier operation. Ibid., 11/4/39.
158. Ibid., 11/4/39 and 12/4/39.
159. Ibid.
160. The envelope had part of a three-cent stamp, which Zhao noticed was not postmarked. This was corroborated later by the police when they found the letter in Peng Fulin's hotel room. Ibid., 15/4/39. The name reads "Zhou [the dynasty] Sword China." The return address on the envelope was the Guansheng yuan shop at 416 Rue du Consulat. When Shanghai Municipal Police detectives later visited this store, they were not surprised to find no one named Zhou on the premises. Ibid., 11/4/39 and 15/4/39.
161. Cited in ibid., 11/4/39. See also the testimony dated 14/4/39.
162. Xi Shitai's house was located at No. 12, Lane 127, Lloyd Road, but the back door opened onto Lane 139. Ibid., 11/4/39.
163. One of the interrogations suggests there may have been a third lookout, Peng Fulin's younger brother, Jinyi, who escaped with Yuan Dechang. Ibid., 13/4/39.
164. The forty-year-old Shandong guard, Song Jiangrong, was a police watchman, Chinese police watchman no. 277, licensed to bear firearms. Zhao, the Chinese beat policeman, Chinese police constable no. 730, was armed only with his whistle. Ibid., 11/4/39.
165. Ibid., 11/4/39.
166. The twenty-three-year-old waiter, a tea boy at the Dadong xin lüguan (94 rue Palikao), was named Li Xinghe. The police initially mistook him to be Peng Jinyi, Peng Fulin's brother; but they soon discovered his real identity. Li Xinghe claimed to have met the wounded man along Lloyd Road, where he had hired two rickshaws to take them to the Nanjing Hotel. On the way, however, the two had stopped by Yuan Dechang's place where Peng Fulin had given him back his pistol. Ibid., 11/4/39. 12/4/39, 15/4/39.
167. Ibid., 11/4/39.
168. Ibid.
169. One of the men must have returned to the boardinghouse with their luggage after checking out of the hotel.
170. Ibid., 11/4/39, 15/4/39
171. Ibid., 20/4/39. This was two days after a Nationalist assassin "executed" Wang Xianming, a section chief (kezhang) in the puppet municipal government, in the French Concession, and on the very day that Yang Qiguan, chief of the municipal Department of Statistics and Taxes (tongshui chu), was repeatedly stabbed by a "heroic Han" (zhuang Han). SB, 18 April 1939, p. 12, and 21 April 1939, p. 11. On July 21, 1939, the Japanese Military Police informed the Shanghai Municipal Police, who had handed Zhao over to them, that the prisoner had been sentenced to death on July 10. SMP, D-9122, 22/7/39, p. 1.
172. Cheng Yiming, "Juntong tewu zuzhi de zhenxiang" [The truth about the special services organization of Juntong], in Guangdong ziliao, vol. 29 (Guangzhou: Wenshi ziliao chuban-she, 1980), 231–33; Shen Zui, Juntong neimu, 83; Zhang Weihan, "Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’" 146. Emily Hahn poked fun at the public rumors in the 1940s that Chiang Kai-shek was "in constant secret communication with Wang Ching-wei [Jingwei]" as an emblem of the Chinese obsession with espionage, but the truth was not far removed insofar as Dai Li was concerned. Emily Hahn, China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1944), 96.
173. Xianggang qunzhong chubanshe, ed., Dai Li zhi si [The death of Dai Li] (Hong Kong: Xianggang qunzhong chubanshe, n.d.), 16.
174. One letter to the editor of China Weekly Review read: "Since the occupation of the Shanghai outskirts by the Japanese invaders and their ‘running dogs,’ headed by Wang Ching-wei [Jingwei], this city, which was formerly known as a metropolis of peace and order, has now become a place of horror." CWR, 29 March 1941, p. 109.
175. Tao Juyin, Tianliang qian de gudao [The isolated island before daybreak] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1947), 1.
176. The messages were thereafter kept in a special file numbered 0042 (42 being the multiplication of 7 times 6 or "76") in a green safe in his office. Liu Gong, "Wo suo zhidao de Zhongtong" [The Central Committee Statistics Bureau that I knew], Wenshi ziliao xuanji, no. 36 (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, December 1962), 79; Zhu Zijia, Wang Zhengquan de kaichang yu shouchang, 2:68–74.
177. Xu Zongyao, "Zuzhi Juntong Beiping zhan heping qiyi de qianqian houhou," Wenshi ziliao xuanji, no. 68 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 206; Xu Zhaoming, "Hanjian Zhou Fohai goujie Juntong ji qi xiachang" [Chinese traitor Zhou Fohai's unsavory alliance
178. Mao Dun [Shen Yanbing], Fushi [Corrosion] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chuban-she, 1981), passim; Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 114. But see also Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet without Honor (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), 20; and H. R. Kedward, Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940–1944 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 32–33.
179. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 300.
180. Cheng Yiming, "Dui Shen Zui ‘Wo suo zhidao de Dai Li’ de buchong, dingzheng," 249.
181. Xianggang qunzhong chubanshe, ed., Dai Li zhi si, 13–14.
182. Collaboration, however, was the main subject of a long-running television series in mainland China in the 1980s about wartime Beiping. The series, based upon a work by Lao She, was called Four Generations under the Same Roof (sishi tongtang). One major exception is the research group under Professor Huang Meizhen at Fudan University. See, e.g., Huang Meizhen and Zhang Yun, Wang Jingwei guomin zhengf u chengli, passim.
183. This discussion owes much to Poshek Fu's subtle analysis in Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, 162–65; and in Poshek Fu, "Intellectual Resistance in Shanghai: Wang Tongzhao and a Concept of Resistance Enlightenment, 1937–1939" (paper delivered at the Association for Asian Studies meetings, San Francisco, March 24, 1988), 7.
184. Cheng Yiming, "Dui Shen Zui ‘Wo suo zhidao de Dai Li’ de buchong, dingzheng," 247. For an example of an "arch traitor" escaping capital punishment after turning over five tons of gold and silver, see the case of Wang Shijing. Wenhui bao, 16 October 1946, p. 1.
185. This ambiguity is present throughout the war crimes cases detailed in Nanjing shi dang'an guan, ed., Shenxun Wang wei hanjian bilu [Records of the interrogations of the Wang puppet traitors] (Jiangsu: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1992).
186. Li Zhaochun, "Shenfen fuza de Pan Hannian" [The complicated identities of Pan Hannian], Gongdang wenti yanjiu 9, no. 3 (March 15, 1983): 114–18.
187. Cheng Yiming, "Dui Shen Zui ‘Wo suo zhidao de Dai Li’ de buchong, dingzheng," 16;Howard L. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 3:36. Koiso Kuniaki, a member of the Tasei (Control) faction and former commander of the Japanese military forces in Korea, was trying to wrest control of the army from the militarists then in command. The Miao Bin affair provided his enemies in the cabinet with a pretext to call for his dismissal. Information supplied by Dr. Irwin Scheiner.
188. Cheng Yiming, "Dui Shen Zui ‘Wo suo zhidao de Dai Li’ de buchong, dingzheng," 17;Howard L. Boorman, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 3:37. Though there is no evidence to support the hunch, Dai Li's accidental death after Miao Bin's release may have had more than a little to do with his rearrest.
189. Cited in Boyle, China and Japan at War, 33.