Taiwanese Colonial Subjects as Imperial Intermediaries in Occupied Xiamen, 1938–1945

• In Event: 366. Reassessing Chinese Collaborationist Regimes under Japanese Wartime Occupation, 1938–1945

Abstract

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 had major repercussions for thousands of Taiwanese subjects of Japan who resided in South China. Facing the backlash of anti-Japanese violence by local Chinese, most Taiwanese in Fujian and Guangdong provinces evacuated to Taiwan by the fall of 1937. Those who remained were imprisoned or executed by the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) as "Chinese traitors" and suspected spies of Japan. With the Japanese military takeover of coastal South China in 1938–39, however, Taiwanese returned to the region to serve the Japanese occupation regime as intelligence and police agents, entrepreneurs, and education and propaganda liaisons. The Japanese media celebrated such Taiwanese personnel as the "perfect imperial intermediaries" for their regional and linguistic skills that were instrumental to the Japanese administration of South China.

Yet while the Japanese celebrated overseas Taiwanese as "model subjects" and "imperial pioneers" of the South China warfront, contemporary Chinese newspapers and government reports condemned the overseas Taiwanese for abusing their imperial status at the expense of their Chinese "compatriots." Drawing on Japanese- and Chinese-language archives, newspapers, and postwar oral histories and memoirs, this presentation examines how the Japanese wartime mobilization of Taiwanese as imperial intermediaries engendered multiple, often conflicting layers of imperial relations in South China, which would later result in devastating Sino-Taiwanese clashes after the fall of Japan's empire in August 1945.

Author

• Seiji Shirane, City University of New York