Wang Jingwei, the Nanjing government and the problem of collaboration (China, Japan, Soviet Union)

This dissertation seeks to go beyond labels of treachery to examine the ideological motivations of Wang Jingwei's collaboration with Japan during the anti-Japanese War (1937–1945). As a point of departure, I argue that everyone in China at the time was a collaborator—Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) with the United States, the Chinese Communists with the Soviet Union, and Wang with Japan—and that particular collaboration was a product of a particular vision of the nation. Suggesting that Wang needs to be understood as a figure in history, rather than, as he is generally seen, a villain in a morality play, I argue that the label of “hanjian ” (“traitor”) that is usually applied to him must be seen as a term in the rhetoric of power that legitimates other ideologies.; This dissertation shows that Wang's version of nationalism was radically different from that of those who insisted on resistance. First, Wang was concerned more about people and their livelihood as well as the nation than about the state itself (the National Government under Jiang Jieshi) in his decision for collaboration. Second, Wang's nationalism was, according to him, compatible with Greater Asianism (dayazhou zhuyi), which had its origins in Sun Zhongshan's Pan-Asian idea that was shared and echoed by both the Chinese and the Japanese at the turn of the century. Third, anti-Communism was a crucial issue in Wang's version of nationalism. Thus in his collaboration, Wang, a major figure of the non-Communist Leftists, placed the Communist issue at the center of his dissatisfaction with the state.; Considering the complexities of Chinese nationalism in the 1930s, this study places Wang and his associates in the vortex of the complex and diverse politics of China in the war. As the war with Japan proceeded, their anxieties over national extinction escalated into activism in order to propose and implement their own vision of saving the nation, promoting a new GMD, and creating a new China. They projected their vision into the future of an industrialized and independent nation, and willingly compromised their ideas for saving and reconstructing the nation to meet immediate needs. Collaboration with Japan, rather than resistance, provided Wang and his colleagues with a way to save, reconstruct, develop, and strengthen China in the particular period, when the existing state failed to do so.