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Towards a New History of Elite Cultural Expression in Japanese-Occupied China

Authors:
Jeremy E. Taylor
Jeremy E. Taylor
Jeremy E. Taylor
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Zhiyi Yang at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Zhiyi Yang
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Abstract

This paper provides a ‘state of the field’ view of what the authors refer to as the ‘new cultural history’ of Japanese-occupied China. It explores how this small but growing field is beginning to provide new perspectives on questions of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’ that have dominated many recent studies of wartime China. In addition, the authors argue that more research needs to focus on elite forms of Chinese cultural expression under occupation (a topic which has hitherto eluded serious academic scrutiny). This introduction also introduces the four key papers which make up this special issue.
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       
                
  
     
 

  

       
  
  
    

 
   


                 
           
            
            
             
          
            
 

             
       
              
               
            
            
           
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   
        
             
            
              
        
              
          
           
          
            
        
           
          
            
            
          
   
             
             
             
            
           
            
           
     

              
   
            
           
    
           
 
               
                 
               
          
               
           
         
            
               
              
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        
        
              
           
             
           
            
           
          
            
          
           
              
             
          
            
   
             
          
            
           
            
              
              
             
           
              

             
            
         
          
              
        
           
          
           
           
            
          
         
             
           
            
               
           
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   
        
            
          
            
           
             
          
            
     
      
               
            
               
              
            
          
          
             
         
            
           
            
       
          
           
           
           
             
            
            
             
             
            
      
             
           
         
  
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        
        
            
           
           
            
         
            
 
        
         
              
           
           
              
           
            
         
           
               
        
            
              
           
              
  
            
           
              
             
              
          
           
            
       
          
            
           
            
             
              
          
            

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   
        
            
                
          

           
            
            
             
            
          
          
            
              
       
            
            
            
            
            
            
          
        
            
            
             
       
             

               
           
              
            
      
            
     
             
            
             
             

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        
        
             
       
              
            
              
             
             
         
           
           
          
            
           
          
              
              
          
            
         
           
         
           
         
          
       
   
             
        
               
                 
             
          

          
    
            
        
              
            
           
            
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   
        
            
          
            
          
           
           
           
          
          
          
           
         
           
             
         
           
    
            
          
            
             
            
           
             
         
  
           
          
   
            
              
         

            
            
        
        
                
         
                
            
         
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        
        
          
          
          
            
       

           
           
           
           
            
         
         張愛玲  
周作人    李麗華         
            
           
             
          
            
            
            
           
          
    
               
         
              
           
             
             
           
              
        
          
             
             
     
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   
        
            
        
            
          
       
         
          
            
        
             
             
              
            

         
           
           
              
           
         
           
            
             
             
            
            
          
            
           
            
           
          
              
          
           
           

     
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        
        
             
      
         
         
         
         
          
        
           
           
            
             
              
         

           
           
         
            
           
            
       
         
            
    
            
            
            
          
             
            
               
    
   
    
               
  
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   
        
 
             
           
          
           
              
             
            
            
            
           
          
          
          
           
            
             
          
           

               
            
             
             
            
                
           
          
             
   
                
          
           
    
               
             
             
             
           
             
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        
        
           
              
             
         
         
          
             
               
           
            
          
          瞿宣穎   
         
              
             
         
           
        
         汪精衛   
          
          
            
          
    陳垣        
           
         
           
      
                
            
     
               
           
              
               
             
           
                
             
       
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   
        
              
          
            
            
            
            
           
         
             
       張充仁   
             
           
           
            
               
 方君璧           
           
            
          
          
              
        
          
            
            
           
            
            
         

            
  
              
    
                
         
 
               
             

               
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        
        
          
               
             
           
           
            
               
 
          
          
                
             
              
             
              
       

             
          
        
          
       
             
          
             
           
         
     
              
            
              

                 
            
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   
        

           
             
    
           
       
           
     
             
           
  
          
      
            
   
            
     
          
 
            
      
         
            
         
    
            
          
   
           
           
       
           
       
        
    
          
    
         
       
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        
        
         
         
           
      
         

            
          
               
 
            
             
          
         
     
          
     
         
        
            
           
         
             
            

             
            
  
           
           
    
            
     
           
       
               
          

           

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   
        
          
  
            
     

           
           
  
             
             
  
          
            
            
         

           
           
             
            
       
          
    
             
        
            
         
          
 
           
         

         
          

            
          

          
      
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        
        
           
 
            

                
     
         
       
         
           
        
           
        
           
       
            
       
        
           

           
          
 
           
     
              
   
        
            
            
    
          
     
            
           
  
            
  
           
          
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... This includes the history of "collaboration" during the Second Sino-Japanese War; the cultural history of the Japanese occupation of China; the musical and sound culture of occupation, war and conflict; and, finally, the development of music in twentieth-century China. This thesis is therefore part of a growing field of research which transcends disciplinary boundaries between history, regional studies and cultural studies and that Jeremy Taylor and Yang Zhiyi have recently called the "new cultural history" of Japanese-occupied China (Taylor and Yang 2020). In discussing the historiographical gaps in our understanding of the cultural history of wartime China, Taylor and Yang not only explain the background to a renewed interest in the cultural history of the Japanese occupation, but also argue for the need for more in-depth studies of the sort that is presented in this thesis. ...
... America and Hong Kong have deconstructed the negative moral judgements associated with the commercial recording industry in the existing literature (Jones 2001, 113;Howard 2015, 40-41) and have questioned the effectiveness and populist aesthetics of resistance song writing in the communist base areas (Liu 2010, 202-3;Gong 2008, 61). This thesis builds on such efforts, emulating lines of enquiry developed in other realms of the "new cultural history" of Japanese-occupied China (Taylor and Yang 2020). ...
... I have asked what we can learn from an analysis of the repertoires and performance practices that the occupation state developed and appropriated between 1937 and 1945. This thesis thus builds on the emerging "new cultural history of Japanese-occupied China", which seeks to analyze the cultural production of the occupation state to better understand Chinese "collaborationist" agency, the ideologies and campaigns of the occupation state, continuities with pre-war developments and similarities with cultural production in other wartime territories in China and beyond(Taylor and Yang 2020). Through my analysis of musical culture, I have provided a more nuanced view of the occupation state in north China, as well as its ideologies and its relationships (with cultural elites working in north China, with citizens, with its neighbours, and with the Japanese empire). ...
Treasonous repertoires: Performing collaboration and musical life in Japanese-occupied Beijing, 1937–1945
Article
Full-text available
  • Aug 2022
This thesis explores the musical culture of the “occupation state” in Japanese-occupied Beijing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). While cultural production in support of resistance against the Japanese in wartime China is well explored and its memory propagated to boost the CCP’s legitimacy, music composed and performed in support of the occupation state in Japanese-occupied China has largely been disregarded or dismissed. This thesis thus lies at the hitherto uncharted intersection of several areas of research, including wartime “collaboration”, the cultural history of Japanese-occupied north China, the development of music in wartime China, and musical culture of occupation more broadly. What can we learn about the occupation state in north China through an analysis of the musical repertoires and performance practices it developed and appropriated, and how does accounting for the musical culture of the occupation state alter our understanding of musical culture in wartime China? To address these questions, I draw on a broad range of sources, including musical scores, performance programmes and campaign reports published in the occupation state’s main news outlets, as well as archival material pertaining to the regime’s propaganda policies, music textbooks, a private collection of wartime concert programmes, musicians’ (auto)biographies and recordings. The first three chapters offer an overview of the occupation state, as well as its organization, ideologies and main campaigns in north China. They also provide a critical view of the historiography of music in twentieth century China, explaining the significance of this thesis as an intervention into dominant narratives, and a detailed account of the musical infrastructure in Japanese-occupied Beijing. The second part of the thesis offers a detailed musical analysis of the evolving musical repertoires and performance practices developed and appropriated by the regime with a particular focus on “new music”. I also consider how the regime employed collective and individual gendered voices and the spatial aspects of sound. I show how the song commission and mass singing activities initiated by the occupation state, as well as local musical elites’ concern for topical repertoire and voices, were surprisingly similar to musical developments in both pre-war China and in the non-occupied areas in wartime China. Such continuities and similarities draw into question long-standing narrative alignments between the aesthetic and moral judgement of musical culture in wartime China. I further show how musical repertoire and practice reflects changes and dissonances in the occupation state’s relationship with its citizens and reveals the regime’s attempts at mitigating the limitations of its territorial control, countering the normalization of the condition of occupation, and forging a distinctly local identity for itself through concert programme design. This analysis of the musical culture of the occupation state in north China thus contributes not only to our understanding of the cultural history of the occupation state in Japanese-occupied north China, but to broader discussions of musical culture in twentieth-century China and the role of music in shaping military occupations more broadly.
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... Such work provided historians with a clear understanding of the ways in which resistance shaped everything from visual arts to literature in the communist-controlled base areas, China's southwest and the 'orphan island' (gudao) of unoccupied Shanghai prior to 1941. 7 Only in recent years has this focus been challenged by the emerging 'new cultural history' of Japanese-occupied China, 8 a subfield that has encouraged scholars to analyse literature, filmmaking and visual cultures in the occupied cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, revealing the often unexpected ways in which Chinese cultural workers carved out new modes of agency and creativity under Japanese rule. 9 In the wider realm of wartime cultural history, however, occupied rural China remains largely absent. ...
“To Cleanse the Countryside We Must First Cleanse Hearts”: The Culture of Rural Pacification in Japanese-occupied China
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2022
Contributing to a growing literature on the transnational history of ‘collaborationism’ under wartime occupation, this paper examines ‘Rural Pacification’ – the counterinsurgency campaigns that were prosecuted from 1941 to 1943 in Japanese-occupied China – from the perspective of culture. In this paper, I argue that, despite being initiated as a military project, the ‘political work’ of Rural Pacification, and particularly the use of cultural production to spread government ideas to rural communities in the Lower Yangtze Delta, marked a crucial part of these campaigns. Rural Pacification was not purely about the eradication of communist resistance in China, but also about ‘cleansing hearts’.
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Saving China and admiring Japan: Cultural traitor Qian Daosun
Article
  • Mar 2024
Qian Daosun (1887–1966) was imprisoned for collaborating with the Provisional Government in North China under Japanese occupation, and to this day he is labelled as hanjian (traitor). Yet, Qian was first and foremost a cultural literatus, librarian, and an exceptional translator with an in-depth understanding of Japanese culture and languages. This article examines the crucial role that Japan and the Japanese language played for Chinese cultural literati in their quest to save China. It also brings to the forefront the dilemmas and agonizing choices Qian faced in his attempt to promote Sino-Japanese cultural exchange in the midst of war, in particular as a librarian. Wartime libraries are highly contested sites of selection, destruction, censorship, preservation, confiscation, and knowledge production. An added layer of complexity was Japan’s cultural policy in China that promoted Japanese-language collections and governed libraries such as the Beijing ¹ Modern Science Library where Qian worked. What exacerbated Qian’s dilemmas was his upbringing, which led him to form close personal connections with like-minded Japanese literati. Lastly, this article revisits the hanjian label by comparing Qian’s fate to that of other librarians and returned students of Japan, such as May Fourth writer Lu Xun and patriotic bibliophile Zheng Zhenduo. By deliberately examining May Fourth writers alongside hanjian and Japanese intermediaries, the intention is to dismount arbitrary labels and divisions that have set them apart and against each other in the resistance versus collaboration dichotomy.
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The Sensual Surplus of History: Cao Hanmei’s Pictorial Adaptations of Jin Ping Mei in Wartime China
Article
  • Jun 2023
This paper explores the life and works of Cao Hanmei as a “misfit” in Chinese cartoon history, who, against the dominant understanding of wartime cartoons as a form of resistance and enlightenment, chose to visualize Jin Ping Mei in occupied Shanghai. I examine the stylistic transformations throughout Cao’s two-decade-long endeavors visualizing the novel and unravel the intricate dynamics between his works and his times. I argue that Cao’s pictorial adaptations of Jin Ping Mei engage with history not only by projecting contemporary struggles, chaos, and trauma onto a well-known ancient story, as other critics have suggested, but more importantly by constructing a “sensual surplus” that defies appropriation by the grand narratives of history. This sensual surplus manifests in his affective combination of the genre hybridity and stylistic anachronism of manhua, the critical re-envisioning of female characters, and the mobilization of feminine details and condensed surfaces. Through Cao’s case, this paper aims to enrich the understanding of the complexity of Shanghai’s visual culture in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the continuities and discontinuities after the Japanese occupation, and to demonstrate the porous boundary between cartoons and other forms of visual arts that approach history through images.
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Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China
Book
Full-text available
  • Dec 2017
Throughout the War of Resistance against Japan (1931–1945), the Chinese Nationalist government punished collaborators with harsh measures, labeling the enemies from within hanjian (literally, “traitors to the Han Chinese”). Trials of hanjian gained momentum during the postwar years, escalating the power struggle between Nationalists and Communists. Yun Xia examines the leaders of collaborationist regimes, who were perceived as threats to national security and public order, and other subgroups of hanjian—including economic, cultural, female, and Taiwanese hanjian. Built on previously unexamined code, edicts, and government correspondence, as well as accusation letters, petitions, newspapers, and popular literature, Down with Traitors reveals how the hanjian were punished in both legal and extralegal ways and how the anti-hanjian campaigns captured the national crisis, political struggle, roaring nationalism, and social tension of China’s eventful decades from the 1930s through the 1950s.
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The ‘Occupied Lens’ in Wartime China: Portrait Photography in the Service of Chinese ‘Collaboration’, 1939–1945
Article
Full-text available
  • Oct 2019
This article explores the importance of portrait photography to the wartime collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei, which governed parts of Japanese-occupied China from 1940 to 1945. The article demonstrates how, for a combination of practical, political, and cultural reasons, studio portraiture was chosen as one of the primary forms of media for the propagation of iconography by this administration. Studio portraiture was also, however, a realm in which this Chinese regime sought to stamp its own mark on visual culture, separate from the iconography of the occupying Japanese. The article demonstrates this by tracing the origins and fate of a number of widely circulated studio portraits of Wang taken in 1939, 1940, and 1941. This article also speculates about the possibility of identifying and defining an ‘occupied lens’ during the war, one which was clearly derivative of prewar forms yet evolved in ways which set it apart both from Japanese propaganda and from the visual culture of resistance.
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