Classifying Old Collaborators for a New State: The Politics of Ambiguity in Post-Colonial Northeast China, 1946–1952

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Colonial and Postcolonial Governance

Abstract

Why would a post-colonial state simultaneously classify culpable collaborators by different even contradictory standards? When addressing the personnel historically affiliated with Japanese colonization in Northeast China, the Chinese Communist Party implemented polysemous classifications over who should be categorized as collaborators. While a position-based classification defined collaborators as the individuals politically affiliated with the colonial rule, another biography-based classification convicted all the colonial personnel with equivocal personal histories, with a third, morality-based classification distinguishing vicious enemies from virtuous people according to whether someone was morally impenitent or reformable. Instead of taking effect sequentially, these multiple classifications coexisted and thus constituted a status of ambiguity. Building upon existing literature that considers ambiguous classifications as constitutive of state rule, this article takes a theoretical lens viewing ambiguity as the state’s adaptive strategy to navigate contradictory goals in unsettled times. Specifically, the Communist Party relied on the morality-based classification as an overarching standard which allowed for the coexistence of otherwise competing voices. This politics of ambiguity can be further explained as embedded within the post-colonial institutional transition, where the classificatory ambiguity of collaborators was contingent on their mediating role in effecting institutional changes compatible with the new statecraft. I propose an eventful model of moral boundary making and unmaking to interpret the dynamic interactions among macro-institutional changes, meso-mobilizational patterns, and micro-strategic adjustment. This article reconceptualizes ambiguity as a historically contingent result of boundary dynamics to enrich the political sociology of ambiguity with the processual perspective of classification struggles.

Author

• Yuchao Yao, University of Virginia