Wartime collaboration through a collaborator’s eyes: Zhou Fohai (1897–1947) and his diary

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the politics and ideology of collaboration in China during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression through Zhou Fohai’s diary. It suggests that his collaboration be understood as a complex wartime phenomenon that demonstrates a different version of nationalism with an aim to alleviate pains and hardships of the people during the war and with a prospect for China’s survival and development based on anti-communism and Sun Yat-sen’s Pan-Asian idea that viewed Japan as its crucial partner. Zhou’s collaboration also needs to be approached within the context of the Guomindang’s political culture and history, as he believed that organizing a separate National Government had been an acceptable political undertaking in the party with two precedents. His diary also testifies that the debacle of the Nanjing collaborationist government was not just due to its nature as a “puppet regime,” but a product of complex factors deep-seated in the party’s incorrigible culture and practice.