GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

REPOSITIONING THE PRESENT INTO HISTORY:

JEAN PAUL SATRE AND THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF CHINA

HIST 606: COLLABORATION IN WWII

DR. AVIEL ROSHWALD

BY

SEAN P. MCBRIDE

WASHINGTON, DC

14 APRIL 2010

AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM

McBride, 1

According to Jean Paul Satre, collaborators in conquered states practice the intellectual

gymnastics of “historicism” in order to justify their decision to work with their conquerors. They

accept their conquest as a fait accompli, and equate their submission to their conqueror with a moral

decision based on a “vague belief in progress.” Seen through the lens of the Hegelian dialectic,

Satre’s argument suggests that collaborators view their collaborationist regime as a synthesis of the

prewar regime and the foreign conquerors. Their logic goes as follows: history is fundamentally

progressive, and the defeat of the nation is the latest chapter of history; ergo, the defeat of the nation

serves a progressive aim. Such a view allows the collaborators to define themselves as

“progressives” and their resistors as obstructionists or terrorists, allowing the end of historical

progress to justify the means of harsh and violent repression. The collaborators therefore assume the

direction and end state of progress and define their decision to collaborate as part of a necessary

chain of events leading to that end state. By connecting their decisions to with an imagined

continuity of progress, Satre views collaborators as guilty of “historicism” or burying the short- and

medium-term consequences of their actions under the presumed long-term promise of progress by

redefining present actions as future history.

While Satre’s assessment forms an especially poignant intellectual criticism of the decisions

of select French figures, such as Maréchal Pétain, Pierre Lava, and Robert Brasillach, to collaborate

with the German occupiers, this paper seeks to utilize Satre’s theoretical framework to examine the

Japanese occupation of Manchuria and China. Due to the differences in the Japanese occupation of

these two regions, this paper will deal these two distinct experiences of collaboration separately. Did

these collaborators perform Satre’s intellectual gymnastics of historicism like their French

counterparts? Did they consider their decision a moral one? Did they justify their actions according

to a progressive view of history? Did they imagine their present collaboration as a future past?

The Japanese colonial enterprise in Manchuria bears certain resemblances to the German

occupation of France. The actual military act of conquest was quite comparatively brief in both

McBride, 2

circumstances. Afterwards, both conquered areas formed new regimes more closely aligned with the

conqueror: Vichy France and Manchukuo. The political legitimacy of both of these regimes also

hinged on the “collaboration” of certain high-level local elites (Maréchal Pétain in France and Pu Yi

in Manchuria) willing to step forward to facilitate this shift in power and authority. Despite these

superficial similarities, the role of collaboration in Manchukuo and Vichy France was fundamentally

different. Because Manchuria “defies the usual spatial classifications of historical regions” due to a

multifaceted history as borderland, province, and “reservoir” for the conquest of China,1 the Chinese

Nationalist Movement was a new development that only began to affect Manchuria in the 1920s.2

Not only did Manchuria lack the sort of sacrosanct sense of nationalism á la France, but one can

argue that Japanese imperialism actually predates contemporary Chinese nationalism in Manchuria.

Absent an analogous sense of nationalism, it is impossible to satisfactorily apply Satre’s ideas on

collaboration to Manchuria either before or after the Manchurian Incident. Did Zhang Zuolin or

Zhang Xueliang imagine their collaboration with the Japanese as a new progressive chapter in

history? This is doubtful given their status as anti-nationalist and traditionalist warlords.

Considering the Manchu legacy of acting as a potential “reservoir” for conquering China, the Zhangs

likely viewed Japanese interventionism as temporary means to strengthen their hand vis-à-vis their

strategic competitors and expand their influence into China. In fact, why would these warlords even

feel the need to perform the intellectual gymnastics of “historicism”? As pre-nationalist actors, the

Zhangs viewed nationalist tempers are something “to be cooled” or a tool to use to extract demands

from the Japanese.3 Considering that the Japanese assassinated Zhang Zuolin, it is unlikely that

Zhang Xueliang honestly entertained romantic ideas of Asian co-prosperity under Japanese

hegemony.4 Such an comparison with France is even more difficult following the Manchurian

1 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, 43

2 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 37

3 Young, 37.

4 Young, 38.

McBride, 3

Incident, as the nominally-sovereign Manchurian Emperor, Pu Yi, was “powerless” and “the political

structure was carefully controlled by the Guandong Army.”5 In comparison to Maréchal Pétain,

Pierre Lava, and Robert Brasillach, Pu Yi never meaningfully exercised power, making it highly-

questionable to assess the morality of decisions he never had the agency to make. As these cases

demonstrate, Satre’s criticism of collaborators does not translate well to the circumstances of

Japanese influence and occupation in Manchuria.

Japanese occupation policies in wartime China were fundamentally different than in the

fictionally-sovereign Empire of Manchukuo, let alone in Vichy France. Because of this difference,

Timothy Brook argues that collaboration in China occurred “not… at the top as it had in France…

[but] at the bottom, in the county towns… at the local level.”6 Because collaboration occurred “at the

bottom” following a wake of extreme violence by the Japanese Army, the object of collaboration was

“mundane,” dealing with “supplying food, organizing transportation, arranging security – the sorts of

matters that local elites have to solve under any political dispensations to ensure social reproduction

and to maintain themselves in power.”7 This “mundane” collaboration does not however seem

compatible with Satre’s comments about historicism. How can these local Chinese elites put

themselves “in a far away future” when they are most concerned with the “mundane” tasks of

protecting life and property, preventing rape, and putting food on the table? This sort of “mundane”

collaboration surely worked on a day-to-day basis, not as part of some long term vision of Asian co-

prosperity. And why would these collaborators by morally troubled by their “mundane

collaboration? Unlike the willful collaboration of certain Vichy officials in the Holocaust, the

majority of Chinese “collaborators” appear to simply have cooperated to ensure survival.

The clearest exception to this assessment is Su Xiwen, leader of the Great Way Government

in occupied Shanghai. Unlike the “mundane” collaborators in occupied China, he perhaps imagined

5 Duara, 65.

6 Timothy Brook, Collaboration, 2.

7 Brook, 7.

McBride, 4

his actions as connecting to a future “Great Way” China under his leadership, but so what if he

practiced historicism? Surely all factions within the Chinese Civil War did the same. Furthermore,

Satre’s accusation that collaborators “confuse the necessity to submit to the factual… with a certain

inclination to morally approve of it” can apply equally to those that collaborated with the Japanese,

the Nationalists, the Communists, or the local war lords. In the context of the Civil War, it is

impossible to speak of either a single Chinese nationalism or a single “other.” The multiplicity of

nationalisms makes it especially difficult to argue that Chaing Kaishek or Mao Zedong represented a

Chinese nationalism any more sacrosanct than Sun Xiwen, especially considering the Great Way

Government’s manifesto to “remedy the sickness that the Nationalists had inflicted on China… as

Chinese curing Chinese.”8

Absent Chinese collaborationists along of the lines of Robert Brasillach, who were the true

believers of Asian brotherhood and co-prosperity? The answer seems to be certain Japanese elites

and pacification agents, who, given the rational disconnect between their ideology and the oppressive

Japanese measures in China, ironically most closely approximate Satre’s “historicism.” Viewing the

reality of Japanese military administration as a “Chinese liberation movement” required precisely the

sort of mental gymnastics Satre described. One could only make this connection if one was

convinced of a progressive view of history that could justify the means of Japanese brutality, which

perhaps is why the romantic narrative of Manchurian liberation uses Marxist elements such as a

portrayal of Zhang Xueliang’s regime as a “queer alliance between the bourgeoisie and semifeudal

tyranny.”9 Yet what does this mean if Satre’s comments about collaborators best apply to Japanese

occupiers? Although that answer is beyond the scope of this paper, this ironic twist emphasizes the

inability of Satre’s comments to meaningfully analyze the actual practice of Chinese collaboration.

8 Brook, 163.

9 Young, 284.

McBride, 5

As this paper has demonstrated, the use of Satre’s theoretical framework of collaboration to

examine the Japanese occupation regimes in Manchuria and China are fraught with difficulty.

Ultimately, this relates to the close relationship between the concepts of collaboration and

nationalism. Simply put, the expression and centrality of nationalist thought differed substantially

between an “ancient” French nation-state with a legacy of overseas colonialism and the even-more-

“ancient” multiethnic land-based Chinese Empire. This paper does not argue against the utility of

recontextualizing Satre’s observations in a different region, as such an act could isolate theoretical

commonalities to construct a more universal and comparative theory of collaboration. Rather, this

paper demonstrates that China, which approximates the geographic and demographic scale and

diversity of the entire European continent, is particularly unsuitable ground for the transplant of

Satre’s ideas on French collaboration. In the context of a civil war between nationalists, communists,

traditionalists, and war lords, it is difficult to speak of a universal sense of Chinese nationalism or

moral virtues that transcended power of raw force. For this reason, Satre’s criticism that

collaborators “confer to power some obscure moral virtue” appears downright foolish in the context

of China and Manchuria. In order to fairly relate Satre’s characterization to an Asian context, other

locations are perhaps more analogous to the French experience of collaboration. Due to its smaller

size and longer collaborative relationship with Japan, perhaps Korea would be useful in this regard.

Because of the theoretical dependence of collaboration on the concept of nationalism, scholars must

ensure that comparative examinations of collaboration are based around analogous experiences of

nationalism.