ICONOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION ICONOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION Visual Cultures in Wang Jingwei’s China, 1939–1945 Jeremy E. Taylor University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2020 University of Hawai‘i Press The Open Access edition of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that digital editions of the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Commercial uses and the publication of any derivative works require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Creative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. ISBN 9780824887704 (PDF) ISBN 9780824887711 (EPUB) ISBN 9780824887728 (Kindle) Open Access edition sponsored by the European Research Council. Advertising poster for Taiwanese green tea (circa 1941) featuring Manchukuo, RNG Chinese and Japanese women, and the flags of these three countries. Courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan History, Tainan (Image ID 2013.038.0003). For my sons Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Contextualizing the Wang Jingwei Regime 19 Chapter 2 Visual Cultures under Occupation 39 Chapter 3 Visualizing the Occupied Leader 59 Chapter 4 Gendered and Generational Archetypes 88 Chapter 5 Rivers and Mountains 115 Conclusion Beyond the Colonial Gaze 145 Glossary 155 Notes 161 Bibliography 195 Index 221 vii Acknowledgments The idea for this book first emerged out of a number of research initiatives pursued from 2012 onward. It would never have been completed, however, had it not been for the support of the European Research Council (ERC), which in 2016 awarded me a Consolidator Grant. With this grant, I was able to launch the Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia (COTCA) project and dedicate much-needed time to this book. Research for this book was thus made possible through the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Number 682081). A number of former teachers, peers, friends, and colleagues read earlier drafts of sections of the book and offered valuable advice. The list includes Craig Reynolds, Grace C. Huang, and Tehyun Ma. I am also indebted to numerous scholars who discussed some of the ideas that inspired the book with me, including (among others) Andrea Germer, Barbara Mittler, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Sophia Lee, Hsiao-ting Lin, Zhiyi Yang, Mire Koikari, David Serfass, Parks Coble, Diana Lary, Lu Fang-shang, Kari Shepherdson-Scott, and Ethan Mark. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their erudite and constructive suggestions for improvements to the manuscript. In Nanjing, I thank the staff of the Second Historical Archives and the Nanjing Library, all of whom were extremely helpful during my visits to that city. I also thank Zhang Chengyu at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology for her friendship. Staff at the Shanghai Library were also very helpful. In Taipei, I thank the staff at Academia Historica (especially Wen-Shuo Liao) and the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. In the United States, a number of people at the Hoover Institution (especially Lisa Nguyen and Hsiao-ting Lin) and the Stanford East Asia Library (especially Zhaohui Xue) were extremely helpful and encouraging. Staff at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley (especially Deborah Rudolph), also provided much-needed assistance, as did staff at the Library of Congress’ Asian Reading Room. In the United Kingdom, staff at the British Museum, such as Helen Wang and Alfred Haft, ix x Acknowledgments were always very kind in answering queries and allowing me access to collections. Some sections of this book were presented in seminar form or as confer- ence papers. I thank all those who offered suggestions on such occasions, including panel members (or organizers), discussants, and audience members at the following events: the Department of East Asian Studies seminar at the University of Cambridge in 2014; the “Artful Bodies: Charisma and the Aesthetics of Power” workshop at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies in 2015; the European Association of Chinese Studies conference in St. Petersburg in 2016; the Chinese Studies seminar series at the University of Nottingham (Ningbo campus) in 2017; the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore in 2017; the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Toronto in 2017; the “Visual Histories of Occupa- tion” workshop at the University of Nottingham in 2017; and the Chinese Studies seminar series at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. In 2019, sec- tions were also presented in seminar form at the University of Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, and the Australian National University. Finally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wife and children for their love and loyalty, and especially for their patience during my time abroad in pursuing research for this book—and in writing it. This book would never have been completed without their support. ICONOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION Introduction The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) is one of the most the most widely studied periods in modern Chinese history. Indeed, the seventieth anniversary of the war’s end in 2015 heralded a veritable industry of mono- graphs, conferences, and exhibitions dedicated to the memory of this con- flict throughout the Chinese-speaking world, and throughout the field of Chinese historical studies. The result of such activity was a newly invigo- rated interest in the war, a range of new studies written from a wide array of methodological, conceptual, and ideological perspectives, and a recon- sideration of the war’s far-reaching impact on China and the wider region.1 In light of the sheer volume of scholarship that was produced in and around 2015, one could be forgiven for thinking that there is little left to learn about Japan’s invasion and subsequent occupation of China. How- ever, 2015 came and went with some aspects of this conflict being left un- touched by scholars and officials alike. While, as we shall see, the story of Japanese conquest and Chinese suffering is already well documented, there is still much we do not know about the nature of life, culture, and politics in those areas of China that were formally occupied by Japanese forces, despite the best efforts of a growing body of historians who have been fo- cusing on such questions over the last decade or more. Indeed, on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, this conflict was officially depicted in 2015 as a life-and-death struggle between two diametrically opposed sides: Chinese and Japanese.2 There seems to have been little historiographical space left for the consideration of those caught in between, such as Chinese who worked in the service of Japanese occupation. The Second Sino-Japanese War began with the Marco Polo Bridge Inci- dent of July 7, 1937. Japanese forces completed their invasion of much of north China within a matter of weeks. As the Japanese advanced inland, they established “client regimes.”3 These client regimes drew on templates developed earlier in other parts of Japanese-occupied Asia, such as the quasi state of Manchukuo, which had been established in 1932 by the 1 2 Introduction Kwantung Army (Kanto¯ gun) and existed as a nominally independent “em- pire,” with the Manchu emperor Puyi as its head of the state. In occupied Beijing, a Provisional Government of the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo linshi zhengfu) (PGROC) was inaugurated in December 1937. This regime would nominally rule over large swathes of the north China plain and many of the major cities of the region until 1940.4 In east China, a Reformed Government of the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo weixin zhengfu) (RGROC) was established in 1938 along the same lines.5 Both of these administrations claimed only limited autonomy from the Japanese, and both were shrill in their condemnation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, international (and Chinese) communism, and Western colonialism. Over the course of 1939, however, the longevity of both these regimes would be brought into question. With the defection of the former Republi- can Chinese premier Wang Jingwei from the wartime Chinese capital of Chongqing in late 1938, and the start of negotiations between Wang and the Japanese government, the notion of some new and much larger client regime began to crystallize. The consequent Reorganized National Gov- ernment (RNG) of the Republic of China was officially inaugurated on March 30, 1940, with the PGROC and the RGROC both being technically subsumed into this new entity.6 Despite ongoing tensions between Wang Jingwei and the Japanese (which would last until Wang’s death in 1944), the RNG would administer much of east and south China for the remain- der of the war. It would claim to administer many of the wealthiest areas of the country and would rule over many millions of Chinese people. Wang’s regime would become virtually synonymous with “collaboration” and “treason” in many official, academic, and lay interpretations of the occu- pation, and Wang himself would become one of the most reviled figures in modern Chinese history.7 For decades, the period in which Wang ruled over areas of occupied China has been presented in the starkest of shades. Indeed, despite recent scholarly interventions questioning the very notion of collaboration, there has been little