Captain of the Roving Bandits : “Collaborationist” Theatre and the Pacification of “Red Drama” in Japanese-Occupied China

Captain of the Roving Bandits (Liukou duizhang) was a three-act play first performed in Yan’an in 1938. Written by Wang Zhenzhi, it was designed to remind audiences about the threats posed by “traitors” (hanjian), and the need for resistance fighters to behave in an upright manner in their struggle against Japanese imperialism. The same play was specifically chosen by the Ministry of Publicity under the “collaborationist” regime of Wang Jingwei in 1941, however, as a means of promoting the anti-resistance Rural Pacification campaign and as a warning against the dangers of communism. The story of the transformation of this play from an anti-hanjian work of CCP propaganda into an anti-resistance work of “collaborationist” propaganda — as well as the controversy that this engendered within the close-knit theatrical community that worked for organs of the “occupation state” — highlights the common practice of cultural borrowing across wartime borders, but also the shared provenance of so much Chinese cultural output during the war, be it communist, Nationalist, or “collaborationist.” Moreover, this case underlines the difficulties that cultural workers employed by the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing faced when trying to strike a balance between the political necessities of occupation and a desire to celebrate forms of modern Chinese cultural expression that had developed in the pre-war years, including spoken drama.