When the Japanese army marched into Nanking in December 1937, the city’s walls became a trap. The terrified population could not flee, and the soldiers went berserk. They raped, tortured, and butchered hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war. The world would call it the Nanking Massacre, and it remains one of the most brutal chapters of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Yet even as Japanese troops committed such atrocities, hundreds of thousands of Chinese—perhaps as many as a million—chose to collaborate with the invaders. Why would anyone side with an enemy capable of such horror? The answer begins long before the war. China had suffered Japan’s aggression for decades, starting with the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, which ended in a humiliating unequal treaty.
In 1931, the Japanese staged the Mukden Incident, a false flag attack, and used it as a pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria. They turned it into a puppet state called Manchukuo. At the head of that puppet state sat the most famous collaborator of all: Puyi, the last emperor of China. After the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, Puyi had lived as a powerless figure, stripped of his throne and his purpose.
When the Japanese seized Manchuria, they promised him a return to imperial glory. Puyi believed they would restore him as a legitimate monarch. In reality, he was a puppet, tightly controlled by the Kwantung Army. His decisions were supervised, and Manchukuo functioned as a Japanese colony.
Still, for Puyi, collaboration seemed preferable to obscurity. In the early years of occupation, the Japanese ruled with a relatively light hand, allowing local elites to keep their positions and their wealth. This was a deliberate strategy. By preserving existing structures of control, the Japanese saved resources and made collaboration tempting.
Local Chinese elites who cooperated knew little about the internal debates within the Kwantung Army, but they understood the deal: cooperate and continue life largely as before. For many, that pragmatic bargain outweighed abstract ideals like nationalism. Pragmatism trumped patriotism. In 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China.
The battle for Shanghai lasted months and cost countless lives. The fall of Shanghai opened the road to Nanking, then the capital. The city fell in just a few days, and the massacre followed. But even the former capital would become the center of another Japanese puppet state.
This time, the collaborator was Wang Jingwei, a nationalist who had once worked alongside Chiang Kai-shek. Wang had a long and bitter rivalry with Chiang. In 1929, two years after Chiang broke with the Chinese communists, Wang advocated for renewing ties with the Soviets, promoting a populist agenda centered on peasants and workers, and reorganizing the nationalist party along democratic lines. His political influence collapsed after the Central Plains War of 1930, when he backed the losing side against Chiang.
The Japanese invasion reinforced Wang’s long-held belief that China could not defeat Japan and would suffer terribly by trying. In 1938, Japan began courting him. He signed an agreement promising cooperation in return for assurances that Japanese forces would eventually withdraw. In December of that year, he publicly split with Chiang.
But he was quickly disappointed to find his regime treated as just another puppet state. In 1939, Wang moved his government to Shanghai. But Japan continued to negotiate with Chiang, weighing which Chinese leader could serve them better. By late 1940, with Japan joining the Axis and US involvement looming, Tokyo finally decided Wang was a safer bet.
His government recognized Manchukuo, allowed Japanese troops to remain, and accepted limited autonomy. Wang’s forces fought alongside the Japanese, notably against the communists in 1941 and in campaigns against nationalist guerrillas. But the Japanese deliberately kept his military weak to prevent him from gaining independence. To Wang’s frustration, Tokyo denied him real authority, using him mainly as leverage against Chiang.
Despite his hopes to unify puppet regimes under his rule, Japan kept China divided between his government in the Yangtze Valley, the North China Political Affairs Commission, and the Mongolian regime under Demchugdongrub. After the war, Wang was condemned as a traitor. Yet his choices reflected the painful dilemmas Chinese leaders faced: resist and risk national devastation, or collaborate in hopes of preserving stability. He miscalculated, trusting Japan to honor promises it never intended to keep.
Still, he foresaw one outcome correctly: that a prolonged Sino-Japanese conflict would weaken the nationalists and allow the communists to triumph. A result Japan itself failed to predict. For Wang, cooperation with Japan seemed the lesser evil, but he never imagined Japan’s eventual defeat by the Allies. The definition of traitor in wartime China has long been shaped by the rivalry between the communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists.
The CCP sought to discredit the KMT by linking it to Wang Jingwei’s pro-Japanese regime. Only after Mao’s death did the party officially recognize the KMT’s resistance role, distinguishing Chiang from Wang. Yet in recent years, the role of the nationalists has been diminished by the Chinese Communist Party. Many explanations for Chinese collaboration point to political motives such as anti-communism, party rivalries, and sociological factors like Japanese education or marriages.
Collaboration with Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War is a widely studied phenomenon. The reasons why some Chinese chose to work with the occupiers varied greatly, ranging from political calculations to sheer survival. At the political level, many collaborators believed that China could not win a prolonged war against Japan. They feared endless bloodshed, social collapse, and the rise of communism if the conflict dragged on.
Collaboration, in their eyes, was a way to preserve stability, negotiate limited sovereignty, and perhaps secure better treatment for Chinese civilians. Some also hoped to use Japan’s support to advance their own vision of nationalism, reform, or personal power. Others were motivated by anti-communism, factional rivalries within the Kuomintang, or disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership. For elites and intellectuals, Japan’s talk of Pan-Asianism offered the illusion of partnership in building a new Asian order free of Western imperialism.
Still, this rhetoric often masked Japan’s true goal of domination. On a more local level, collaboration was often pragmatic. Mayors, police chiefs, businessmen, and landlords cooperated simply to keep their communities functioning under occupation. Joining or tolerating puppet administrations could protect family wealth, maintain social order, or secure access to scarce resources.
For many ordinary Chinese, working with Japan meant food, safety, and survival. At the same time, collaboration was not uniform. Puppet governments like Wang Jingwei’s reorganized national government had some administrative authority, but Japan tightly controlled them, limiting autonomy. Collaboration thus became a constant negotiation, with Chinese leaders trying to gain space while the Japanese sought obedience.
In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of collaborating Chinese, tens of millions of Chinese supported or tolerated resistance movements. So, Chinese collaboration with Japan, while significant, never gave Japan the legitimacy it hoped for. However complicated the reasons to collaborate, the actual experience of collaborating was more ambiguous in its effects and more difficult in its practice than the myth of heroic resistors and cringing collaborators assumes.
Who could know at the beginning that the occupation state would not outlast Japan’s defeat by one day, and that four years after that defeat it would be replaced by a communist state for which the costs of elite collaboration with the Japanese, the nationalists, or even itself would run even higher?
