Wartime Collaboration in a Global Comparative Perspective — The Case of the Wang Jingwei Regime —

This article reexamines Chinese collaboration with Japan during the Sino-Japanese War from a global comparative perspective, focusing on three interrelated dimensions: the ideological nature of collaboration, spatial constraints on political agency, and postwar evaluations shaped by prewar and postwar contexts. By situating the Chinese case alongside both European and Southeast Asian experiences, it highlights the particularities and broader patterns of wartime collaboration. First, the article questions the applicability of collaborationism to the Chinese case. While European collaboration often entailed ideological identification with the occupier, Chinese collaborators rarely demonstrated commitment to Japanese imperial ideology such as Pan-Asianism. Rather than ideological alignment, their cooperation—much like that of collaborators in Southeast Asia—was driven primarily by pragmatic calculations shaped by coercion, survival strategies, and perceived national interests under occupation. Even when endorsing Japan’s “New Order in East Asia,” Chinese collaborators acted within a framework of strategic adaptation, rendering the label “collaborationist” analytically problematic. Second, the geographical location of collaborationist regimes fundamentally shaped their political agency. Both Vichy France and the Wang Jingwei regime pursued forms of state collaboration as sovereign governments. However, whereas Vichy was able to enjoy a certain degree of autonomy by operating from an unoccupied zone, the Wang regime was established in Japanese-occupied Nanjing and remained under direct military and political control. As in Southeast Asia, persistent intervention by the occupying forces confined sovereignty and political independence largely to a formal level. These spatially determined structural constraints undermined legitimacy and obstructed the consolidation of popular support. Third, the article emphasizes the decisive role of prewar colonial conditions in shaping postwar narratives of collaboration. In colonial Southeast Asia, Japanese occupation could be framed as an opportunity for national independence, allowing collaboration to be remembered as patriotic both during and after the war. By contrast, in non-colonial societies such as France and China, resistance-centered narratives had already gained dominance during the war and became central to postwar nation-rebuilding. Within these narratives, wartime collaboration was uniformly condemned as treason, obscuring its complex motivations and concrete practices. Finally, the article highlights the evolution of collaboration in response to changing wartime power relations after late 1942. As Japan’s strategic position deteriorated, collaborators in China and Southeast Asia exploited the occupier’s growing dependence on local cooperation to press for greater political autonomy. Although concessions such as the return of concessions and the abolition of extraterritoriality did not amount to genuine recognition of sovereignty, they reveal the contingent and fluid possibilities embedded in collaboration under shifting wartime conditions. Through global comparison, this study calls for a more nuanced understanding of wartime political agency beyond conventional binaries such as resistance versus collaboration or patriotism versus treason.