ABSTRACT
In its invasion of China (1937), the Japanese military had two prioritized goals to establish a workable occupation: establishing public security and adopting an effective system of commodity controls. Both tasks fell to Special Services (SS) units, attached to every army command and police unit and charged with the direction of the army’s civil affairs, political control and surveillance. Chinese collaborators were a crucial part of the Japanese scenario. In establishing public security, the SS was to set up a viable baojia system. Even though the Chinese had had sporadic experience of the baojia system since the Song dynasty, they were often unwilling to collaborate with these invaders. They met the project with various “weapons of the weak”, such as assorted delaying tactics, not reporting to SS units when ordered to do so and using sundry methods of sabotage. In the face of such opposition, the SS set up new institutions—local militia units and the Youth Corps—to try to facilitate the effort; but nothing seemed to work. From 1940 on, a shortage of money for training and other preparations made these goals even less possible.
Analogous to the baojia as a system of control, economic co-operatives became the local unit through which the Japanese hoped to manage trade in commodities. Though the Chinese had had experience since the beginning of the century with co-operatives, they had been mostly credit co-operatives, not co-operatives for control of commodities and not run by invaders. As with the baojia, the Chinese “weapon” of non-co-operation stymied the Japanese plan. In addition, there was no adhered-to model that the proposed co-operatives were to take; the result was a crazy-quilt of different structures and methods in many counties. This meant the Japanese had a myriad of different co-operative units that they had to police in an ad hoc fashion. In the end, a viable Japanese occupation of northern Zhejiang was thwarted by Chinese realities and Chinese perspectives on the baojia and co-operative projects.
