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The study of wartime collaboration during the Sino-Japanese War from 1937-1945 offers an important but understudied contribution to understanding modern Chinese nationalism and the quest for a modern Chinese state. Declared at the end of the war as traitors (hanjian), Sino-Japanese collaboration has brought with it a pejorative connotation, an expression of power with political intentions to draw lines of orthodoxy that paint collaboration as something markedly different than the nationalisms of the KMT or CCP. In this paper I focus on Zhou Fohai, a secondary but prominent Republican Era figure who served as a pivotal politician in Wang Jingwei's collaborative Nanjing regime. Nationalism will be understood as a fluid political identity that often blurred political party lines and ideologies; taking many paths toward saving China and creating a modem Chinese nation. Zhou Fohai demonstrates this; an example how collaboration was understood as a means to "save China" and a Sun Yatsen inspired ideology that saw Sino-Japanese collaboration as a more viable alternative than a Western or Soviet intervention.
His nationalism will be shown as not "anti-Jiang," but anti-communism and saw his own shifting political allegiances as best for a modern Chinese state. He believed China should likewise remain fluid in its international alliances; a real politick calculation that China should remain fluid in its wartime alliances with a "foot in each boat" (suowei jiaota liang zhi chuan). This will be situated in a "Mandate of Heaven," framework of Chinese statecraft that displaced the "nation" from the center of Chinese nationalism, instead legitimizing a regime's right to rule as sanctioned by an ultimate moral authority and marked by different international and domestic sociopolitical agendas. Thus, rather than understanding collaboration in a moralistic discourse, as a markedly different path embarked on than Mao Zedong or Jiang Jieshi - Zhou Fohai diaries and 1946 trial testimony will demonstrate a much more nuanced and complex picture of wartime collaboration and China's competing nationalisms on the path to creating a modern Chinese state.
Keywords: Zhou Fohai, collaboration, Sino-Japanese War, Wang Jingwei
Sino-Japanese collaboration from 1937-1945 offers an important contribution to understanding nationalism in wartime China. The outbreak of war in East Asia provided a stage for prominent Chinese politicians to fight for disparate, competing visions of an...