"Overseas Taiwanese as Imperial Intermediaries in Occupied South China, 1937–1945"

• In Event: Rethinking the History of Wartime Taiwan

Abstract

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 had major repercussions for the overseas Taiwanese (J. sekimin, C. jimin) in South China. Facing the backlash of anti-Japanese violence, the majority of overseas Taiwanese who resided in Fujian and Guangdong 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 key Fujian and Guandong port cities in 1938–39, however, thousands of Taiwanese returned to coastal South China to serve the Japanese occupation regime as intelligence and police agents, entrepreneurs, and education and propaganda liasons. The Japanese media lionized wartime Taiwanese personnel as "perfect imperial intermediaries" for their regional and linguistic knowledge necessary for 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." This paper examines how the Japanese wartime attempts to mobilize the overseas Taiwanese as imperial intermediaries engendered multiple, often conflicting layers of imperial relations that were not only unique to South China, but also had devastating consequences for Sino-Taiwanese relations after the fall of the Japanese empire in August 1945. The paper will draw on Japanese- and Chinese-language archival documents, newspapers, memoirs, and transcribed post-war oral histories.

Author

• Seiji Shirane, City College of New York (CUNY)