Chapter VII Governing Institutions of the Japanese and Pro-Japanese
Facing the National Armies, and encircling the guerrillas, lie the Imperial Japanese forces. Frank agents of Imperial policy, they—unlike the Hitler-Mussolini contingents in Spain—make no pretense of subordination to their Chinese allies. Publicly and legally instruments of the Japanese state, their function is to destroy the Chinese government, to control and bend Chinese society to the Imperial purposes, and to protect Chinese who come forth as allies. The Japanese Empire is accordingly itself militarily extended to China; occasional, half-hearted attempts to deny the ensuing international complications have been sternly rejected by other great powers. The United States is not alone in insisting on full Japanese responsibility for everything that happens within the zone of Japanese control.
The position of the Japanese army as a governing engine, unacknowledged colonial machinery of a vast unassimilable colony, is not one relished by the Japanese people or by their leaders. Even in the case of Manchoukuo, the Japanese played a half-deception on themselves by pretending that they were extending the area of their influence, not the extent of their responsibilities. In part this distaste for overt control is based on the ease, cheapness and irresponsibility of indirect rule, employed in varying degrees by the British in Malaysia, the French in Indo-China, and the Soviets in Outer Mongolia. The Japanese like to think that they are aiding China, and incidentally themselves, to a New Order in East Asia—autarkic, stable, racially independent of the Whites, militarily secure. They do not like to contemplate the slaughter of innocent people for sheer conquest, or to consider the hopeless immensity of trying to overwhelm China. This complicates their position.1
For if the status of the Japanese army in China is clear, its purposes are not. The war aims of the Japanese are confused. Japan’s goal is defined by overtones of the inexpressible—in economic motivation, once valid, no longer meaningful; in rationalizations so long reiterated that they become genuine; in the toss and push of world affairs, tempting Japan’s leaders to this opportunism or that; in sheer sentiments of Japanolatry, Emperor-worship, racialism, archaic resentment against China, fellow-feeling for the Chinese orientals, and plain fear. A few Japanese know exactly what they want. The policy as a whole, the policy of the Imperial state, encompasses ill-assorted economic, political, strategic, racial and purely ideological objectives.
Even at the simple level of institutional control, the Japanese aim in China has been ill-defined. The restoration of the Manchu monarchy in Manchoukuo was an appeal to monarchist legitimism, to the Chinese past, and to common Confucianist values. When the Japanese came further into China, it was at first expected that they might install Mr. Chin P’u-yi as Emperor of all China, and rehabilitate him in the Palace-museum he left when a youth. Instead, they apparently attempted to create a chain of linked, reactionary, agricultural Chinese states, mixed in form—a federation of princes in Inner Mongolia, an Empire in Manchoukuo, republics elsewhere. They began by going as far as to create a dozen or more ephemeral pro-Japanese agencies—for a while one might legitimately have expected that a Nanking government follow a Peking government, a Hankow government, a Canton government, ad infinitum. But the trend was reversed when the Autonomous East Hopei Anti-Communist Government of Mr. Yin Ju-kêng was merged with the Peking regime, and—as pressure rose in Japan for a settlement of the China affair—a China-wide Japanophile government was first contemplated, and then established. The establishment of these institutions has not meant the abdication of the Imperial Japanese forces from the government of China. The pro-Japanese governments were and are civil auxiliaries of the Japanese army; their influence has in no case extended beyond the immediately effective reach of the Japanese infantry. Even in planning the long-range permanent settlement of Chinese affairs—on her own terms—Japan does not propose to withdraw all her troops from China.
The Japanese Army as a Chinese Government
The Japanese army is the effective military government of occupied China. The Japanophile Chinese have a few troops, who function in close proximity to Japanese, and are in no sense a military counterweight to the invaders. The Japanese army is a large force, modern by somewhat second-rate standards, which requires the use of an effective communications system, modern economic auxiliaries such as shops, banks, post offices, and a variety of other services including hospitals, shrines, brothels, and crematories. These do not exist in China in forms suited to Japanese needs, nor could Japan afford to trust Chinese with the railways, the air services, the river commerce, the telegraphs, the food warehouses, and other most vital services. Thus, all over occupied China, the Japanese have installed a military government.
This government assumes direct responsibility for administering whatever seems necessary or profitable. Thus, in the city of Nanking, the best buildings are occupied by the Japanese, and the Wang government is profoundly gratified to be allowed to share some of them, obtaining second choice. The Japanese military, through protected corporations, supervises the operation of the railroads and airlines, but it does not even rely on the corporations to provide military transport, which is under direct army control. If a Chinese who has gone over to the Japanese and occupies a high position in their protected governments wishes to ride on a Chinese train between Shanghai and Nanking, he must buy a ticket from a Japanese clerk, show it to a Japanese conductor under the eyes of a Japanese guard, with Japanese detectives standing about, order a Sino-Japanese or pseudo-European meal in a Japanese dining car with Japanese waitresses from a menu printed in Japanese, and must pay, not in his own puppet-bank currency, but in special Japanese currency not acceptable in Japan.
To govern China, the Japanese Army has not developed beyond the usual devices of military rule. There are several reasons for this, primary among them the difficulty of governing Chinese at all. In a pluralistic society, such as China, command is largely superseded by negotiation, and the issuer of a command must be prepared for oblique thwarting. A Japanese who tells a Chinese to do something needs a bayonet with which to gesture; otherwise the Chinese, accustomed to circumventing, avoiding, or mocking authority, will disregard him. The Germans may order the Danes to make a two-way street a one-way street, and the Danes, accustomed to authority, will concur. When the Japanese promulgate a regulation, nothing short of massacre could ensure its absolute, unconditional obedience.
The language difficulty is another obstacle to direct Japanese government. A cultivated Japanese and Chinese may write classical Chinese to one another, and even the barely literate can scribble a few characters, the meanings of which may coincide; but the spoken languages differ from one another almost as much as English differs from either. To govern China directly would involve an enormous feat of language training, or an overnight re-shaping of the Chinese national character. Non-violent resistance, wilful but concealed negligence, lurking impertinence, consistent sloppiness, obsequiousness mingled with hatred—these Chinese tools of resistance, added to the language barrier, prevent any early Japanese hope of direct government. In years to come, if such come, Japanese trained in the Chinese language could supersede every Chinese above the level of foreman. A strong tendency in that direction is observable in Manchoukuo.2
The Japanese have abandoned direct government for the present. They would defeat their own purposes by assuming a task for which they have insufficient personnel, which would be very costly, and for which their army is ill-equipped in morale or technical ability. Difficult though it may be to employ pro-Japanese Chinese associates, it would be even more difficult to find Chinese now ready to profess direct loyalty to Japan. The only Chinese thus far Japanized are a number of Taiwanese (Formosans), whose island was ceded to Japan forty-six years ago. Chinese by blood and language, many of them have been reared in the third generation of Japanese rule. Some are fighting with the Chinese forces, but others, loyal to their lawful superiors, betray their fellow-Chinese. The Formosans are insufficient in number to govern China, or to provide Japan with even the most elementary foothold. The Japanese have hence turned to the peculiar form of indirect rule identified by the popular appellation, puppet states.
The Problem of Puppet States
Lawful, well-established indirect rule is a familiar feature of colonial practice. Constituting an internationally recognized legal relationship between the paramount power and the encompassed state, it has been applied extensively by the European powers in Africa and Asia. The Indian and Malay states, under Britain; Cambodia and Annam-Tonkin, under France; the East Indian sultanates, under the Netherlands—these offer a rich repository of precedent.
Unacknowledged intervention involving no legal relationship is also a known feature of modern politics. The practices of the United States in the Caribbean and Central America, particularly during the 1920’s, are familiar, but the leading case of intervention without responsibility occurred in the relationship between the Soviet Union (first the R.S.F.S.R.) and the Outer Mongol People’s Republic. Four features of what has since come to be called political puppetry are here made fully manifest: first, the establishment of the subordinate through the military aid of the superior; second, the continued effective control, unacknowledged in law, of the subordinate by the superior, coupled with economic coordination of the two; third, bilateral insistence upon the formal independence of the subordinate state; fourth, the claim of the superior that it has not intervened, coupled with international non-recognition of the new relationship. The four features—establishment, coordination, fictitious independence and international nonentity—were clearly defined by Soviet political practice in Outer Mongolia and Tannu-Tuva long before Manchoukuo was created.
In addition to this neighborly example, the Japanese had another source, commonly ignored in current Western comment on the Far East, on which to draw: the quasi-familist Confucian international system which prevailed down to the time of men now living. Successive Chinese Empires developed a clear, viable scheme of senior-junior relationships controlling their intercourse with other organized governments. The other, smaller states acknowledged China to be the senior realm, conceding that the Chinese Emperor was lord of the world. They paid formal tribute to China; their envoys were not ambassadors but tributary agents, while Chinese envoys came as high commissioners, superior in rank to the courts to which they were accredited. This relationship (awkwardly termed “dependency,” “vassalage,” “tributary” status, or subjection to “suzerainty,” in Western terms) could not be fitted into the Western state system. Involving the assertion of Chinese power without concurrent admission of Chinese responsibility, it was rejected by the Western states, and lapsed following the French seizure of Indo-China, the British occupation of Burma, and Korean independence under Japanese compulsion. Today, Japan’s moral effusions concerning the New Order in East Asia and her digressions from Western patterns of international law in dealing with Manchoukuo and Wang Ch’ing-wei both indicate that the Japanese move freely, sincerely, and unconsciously in a frame of reference which, obvious to them, is invisible to Westerners. The Japan-Manchoukuo or Japan-Wang relationship could be aligned with the relationship which Li Hung-chang wished, sixty years ago, to maintain in Korea, and found significantly similar. The Japanese understood the position of juniority in international relations: to their intense humiliation, they confessed themselves China’s junior during the Ashikaga period.3
A third meaningful context for Japanese practice is found in the basic, factual scheme of current international relations. No nation in an interdependent world is independent except by legal fiction; none could maintain its present level of civilization without the existence of the others. In these terms, legal independence fades as time passes, and cross-national power becomes more evident. Western imperialism was described by Sun Yat-sen as reducing China to a hypo-colony. More recently, first the Communists and then the Japanese have accused Chiang K’ai-shek of being the puppet of imperialism,4 while occasional Leftists regard Chiang as even now a puppet of Japan5 and a few citizens of imperialist states see him as a Communist puppet. The Germans treat Churchill as the puppet of Roosevelt, and Roosevelt as a puppet for international Jewry, while the present Stalinist line attributes puppetry to the entire catalogue of world political institutions save those made quick by its own infallibility. The fundamental point of such appraisal depends upon the attribution of power relationships. Dependence is indisputable only if one government functions within the military framework of another, or if the personnel of the subordinate is drawn from the superior, or if clear and immediate causal relationships can be proved between the continued fiscal or military action of the sustaining government and the actual existence of the sustained government—although even this last leads to subjective interpretation.
The term puppet is not clear or apt, except in its most concrete sense—that of a person who is almost literally a marionette, whose utterances public and private are not his own, whose actions are supervised, and whose personal choice or opinion is not merely thwarted, but left out of consideration. Not all the Chinese who work with Japan are ventriloquists’ dummies. The author talked freely with men who staked their careers on the inescapable success of the Japanese military, and who functioned in absolute conformity to general limits of policy and publicity laid down by the Japanese; these general limits were wide enough to permit a considerable degree of latitude of manners, and to allow variance in power and policy between the various Chinese under Japan. Use of the term puppet in such cases is not clear. It implies a higher degree of effective Japanese control, and a greater pliability of Chinese cooperators, than can be shown to exist.
Since, however, the National Government is recognized, both by the majority of the Chinese people and by all powers (including Germany and Italy) except Japan, to be the legitimate government of China, representing the Chinese nation, action against that government may properly and strictly be denominated treason; a person so acting may be called, formally, a traitor and, less formally but more descriptively, a Japanophile. Juridically the Chinese Soviet leaders were also traitors, but they were never Japanophile. This term gains by specificity what it loses through awkwardness.
The Provisional and Reformed Governments
The Japanese have determined, assisted and promoted establishment of a number of friendly Chinese governments. Huapeikuo, a North China separatist state, went the way of the Francophile Rhineland Republic; it never got off the drafting board. The East Hopei Autonomous Anti-Communist Government of Mr. Yin Ju-kêng provided, within the North China demilitarized zone, a vast gateway for smuggling; when the National Government withdrew its forces from North China, the Japanese sought more pretentious aids to conquest. The Provisional Government was the first of these, following an Inner Mongol federation (Mêng-liu Lien-ho Tzŭ-chih Chêng-fu), affiliated with Manchoukuo; it was soon rivaled by the Reformed Government; and in March 1940, both were incorporated into the Reorganized National Government of Mr. Wang Ch’ing-wei. Other governments, sponsored by various quarreling departments of the Japanese military, or organized by Chinese confidence men, have appeared transiently and then disappeared.
Three points concerning Japanophile governments contribute to assessment of their chances; their origin and structure; their ideological (narrowly, propagandist) position; and their personnel. These points illustrate a significantly ambivalent trend: the Japanese have found their degree of freedom of action less than they had expected in Chinese politics, and to that extent have been defeated; they have also yielded to the demands of the situation, and have won, in part, in that their chances of success appreciate with realism.
The Provisional Government of the Republic of China (Chung-hua Min-kuo Lin-shih Chêng-fu) was formed at Peking on December 14, 1937, and ended by merger into the Wang Ch’ing-wei government on March 30, 1940, perpetuating a high degree of separatism under the subgovernmental style, North China Political Council. Like its predecessors and successors, it was created by a self-proclaimed committee organized with the consent and knowledge of the Japanese military, if not by the Japanese directly. The members of the Provisional Government were old, weak men, mostly adherents of the Anfu clique which had been Japanophile during and after the War of 1914-18. A few were even brought forth from more archaic strata, lonely adherents to the abandoned monarchy. The youngest were in their fifties and the leading officers were extreme conservatives—men of some intelligence and reputation, but obsolete.
The structure of the Lin-shih Government was interesting in that it formed a republic of three committees, as follows:6
PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT (Committee)
Structurally important features are: the absence of any method of election, direct or indirect, or of any ultimate source of “sovereign” personnel—the government having borne itself out of chaos, constitutionally a remarkable feat; the elimination of even nominal party control of government, or cameral legislation, or constituent assembly, these being hated vestiges of the Chinese and Western, but not Japanese, notion that popular sovereignty is to receive genuflections if not credence; and, most startlingly, the absence of a head! There was no President, Protector, Chief of State, Leader, or Dictator; the highest officer was the Shanghai banker, Mr. Wang K’ê-min, Chairman of the Executive Division (literally, yüan, but not in the Nationalist sense). The scope, succession and competence of this Provisional Government were as much in doubt as its origin.
Under the Provisional Government there flowered a new political philosophy, the Hsin Min Chu I (“Principles of the Renewed People,” “People-Renewing Principles,” or “Principles of the New People”). The similarity of this principle to the San Min Chu I is striking, but is no more than verbal. Propaganda under this credo resembled the Japanese-prepared state-philosophy of Wang Tao, the kingly (as opposed to tyrannous and unnatural) way of the Confucian canon, which—revered throughout the Far East, even by Sun Yat-sen—had been slanted to suit Manchoukuo through a Concordia Society (Hsieh-ho-hui). Each of the Sunyatsenist principles was refuted in detail, Pan-Asian racialism was encouraged, a class-war between the nations was emphasized, and conservatism in thought, manners, and morals recommended. The Peking propaganda machinery was well-financed; the Hsin-min-hui became the only tolerated political group. This hui was headed by Mr. Miao Ping, a Kuomintang Party veteran whose political-bureau experience dated back to the days of Borodin. His renegation, never publicly explained, enabled Japan to issue a careful parody of the San Min Chu I. His assistant was a Japanese. Business associations, student groups, and educational administration were fitted into the pattern. The principles were not logically or systematically developed, but the key terms sufficed to coordinate opportunist appeals justifying the invasion, and opposing resistance, guerrillas, modernizations, and democracy. The Hsin Min Chu I received no credence through conversion, faith, or loyalty. Operating on sound advertising principles, however, they served well even if they failed to command obedience but did unsettle allegiance to the other side, and ubiquitous iteration muddied thought.
The personnel of the Provisional Government included no actively important political leader. Many had been important long before; some were conspicuous in fields other than politics, and had even served on the semi-buffer Hopei-Chahar Political Council which was Chiang’s last compromise with Japan. Japan’s failure to obtain an effective political leader is important, for this lack eventually led to the acceptance of Wang Ch’ing-wei. The old age, past misfortunes, the motley reputations of the Provisional Government leaders attested a national sentiment sufficient to enforce unity beyond the reach of national law.
The Reformed Government of the Republic of China (Chung-hua Min-kuo Wei-hsin Chêng-fu) was established March 28, 1938. It lapsed simultaneously with its rival and colleague, the Provisional Government. There were several suggestive points of difference, although the chief difference was the fact that the Provisional Government operated from Peiping and the Reformed from Nanking. Both were national in form, a difficulty which was solved by the creation of a United Council to speak for all occupied China. This Council had only the power to issue news releases, which it did. Despite duplication of capitals and national form, the Nanking government revealed a slipping in the Japanese insistence on conformity to their ideas.
In structure, the Reformed Government was a mutilated copy of the National Government. It possessed five yüan, thereby continuing the Sunyatsenist constitutional system which Japan first sought to destroy. In doctrine, it took over the North China-Manchoukuo pattern, under the name Ta Min Chu I (Principles of the Great People), with a party under the name Ta-min-hui. The walls of Nanking were covered with the emblem of the party, a red circular shield with a yellow crescent moon enclosing a white star. Quasi-educational work approximated that of the North; but the Japanese found the Yangtze sympathetic to the National Government and Kuomintang, and hence employed devices reminiscent of Chungking.
For Reformed Government personnel, the Japanese found individuals who were in most instances either as old as their Peiping colleagues, but less famous, or much younger, and relatively unknown. With the city of Shanghai only partially under its control, because local opportunists reached the tax offices first, the Reformed Government provided an outlet for persons who had felt themselves unjustly denied office, or slighted by the Kuomintang, or who had wrecked careers, once promising, by some ghastly misstep or crime and now saw a miraculous chance to return.
These new governments could not on principle claim the allegiance of their own clerks. The personnel, disloyal and of poor morale, was often so corrupt that no government services—needed by Japanese civilians and army alike—could be entrusted to them. Multiple taxes blocked Japanese trade in the area Japan had occupied. The Japanese realized that the United Council and the senescent politicians were not enough. Instead of abandoning interventionist governments, they tried a leader of genuine importance, considerable ability, and some following. His treason was Japan’s last chance to govern China without assuming the task herself, risking a premature undertaking. To understand the moves and motives of Wang Ch’ing-wei it is necessary to regard his character and political history.