二战时期日本和滇西土司

Abstract:In the 1930s and early 1940s, China was at war with Japan and China’s Nationalist government moved to Sichuan Province in the Southwest. An ideal location in many ways, Southwest China was also an ethnically diverse place, a crucible for the idea of a modern, unified Chinese nation held together by its constituents. The region became a seedbed for frontier studies and the rethinking of ethnic relations, a region that academics and administrators hoped to transform into a bastion of military resistance and national recovery. This article argues that Pan-Thai nationalism, promoted by the Thai state to spread Thai consciousness among Tai minorities in Southwest China, provided an impetus for these trends. Unity became the national purpose, and the cultural and economic development of Southwest China was conceptualized.

This symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath addresses some of the most fraught issues in historiography, historical remembrance, and contemporary politics. It also reflects on occupation states in Europe and postwar East Asia, while casting important light on contemporary issues of collaboration globally. How are we to assess occupation regimes that emerged in each East and Southeast Asian nation during the Pacific War, as well as in postwar nations including those occuped by the United States or other occupiers. Issues of collaboration in a post-colonial world may be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences of newly independent nations? The issues are closely intertwined with dominant nationalist ideologies that have characteristically obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist politics while establishing their own legitimacy, or what Timothy Brook calls their “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, and at a time when politicians on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, are redefining their relationships, it becomes possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, occupation and collaboration.