"control" And "cooperation": The Sino-japanese War In Shanghai Businessman (1937-1945)

Built on a number of noteworthy studies of Shanghai merchants, this dissertation focuses on the wartime collaboration of Shanghai merchants after Shanghai fell into the hands of the Japanese, by examining an array of their attitudes and activities and its association with the command economy. The fall of the foreign concessions was a watershed during the Japanese occupation in Shanghai. The so-called "conllusion" between the Chinese merchants and the Japanese and the collaborationist authorities happened only after the Wang Jingwei Government had taken over the control of resources due to the Japanese policy adjustment in China. This dissertation takes a close look at the hierachy in the command economy, i.e. from the Board of Directors of the National Commercial Association for Resources Control, down to a wide array of professional associations and factories. Besides, the key figures and their fates in the postwar campaign to eradicate the traitors open up new opportunities for the analysis of wartime traitors and their postwar experience. The two questions which strike me most are: (1) Why those merchants ventured to be "collaborators"? (2) Were "collaborators" in different sectors engaged to a similar degree? If not, what became the criterion to actually discriminate among them? Basing on the scrutiny of sources from archives and libraries in Shanghai, Nanjing and Taiwan, I argue that the level of the collaboration depends on the resources certain merchant possessed and the position he held in the system of the command economy.