Founding Fathers of a Contested Nation: Chinese Collaborators and the Founding Myth of Manchukuo, 1932–37

Every nation has its founding fathers. So did Manchukuo, a contested regime established in Japan-occupied Manchuria in 1932. Throughout its 14-year existence, Manchukuo’s official propaganda celebrated many of its prominent Chinese participants – the same people denounced by the Chinese nation south of the Great Wall as treacherous collaborators – as heroes who fought a fearless battle for an independent Manchuria free of China’s rapacious warlords. These acts of celebration, however, were also attempts to silence. What is little known was that the regime’s Chinese “founding fathers” chose to stay on in occupied Manchuria with their own visions of how this new nation should be organized. They ended up fighting relentlessly, not against warlordism, but against the very Japanese nation builders whom they collaborated with. This group of “founding fathers” encompassed ultra-modernists like Zhao Xinbo, Pan-Asianists like Yu Chonghan, conservative regionalists like Yuan Jinkai, and the famous restorationists Zheng Xiaoxu and Luo Zhenyu. Their desires and struggles constitute a forgotten thread in the intellectual and the ideological fabric of early Manchukuo. Utilizing personal diaries, memoirs and archival documents, this paper explores how the “founding fathers” of a colonial/nation-state brought their very own Chinese ideals into what has so far been understood as a Japanese colonial enterprise. It argues that Manchukuo was not just the crown jewel of Japan’s wartime empire, but also a vanished experimental ground for various indigenous political ideals, most of which were expressed under the rubric of the official Kingly Way ideology. By uncovering the personal stories and intellectual thoughts of these denigrated yet obscure individuals, the paper questions the conventional understanding of collaborators as self-seeking and morally-degenerate individuals, an understanding that continues to dominate Chinese memory of wartime experience.