| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Timothy Brook. Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 288. $49.95.
Timothy Brook's superb book is an example of the doing and writing of history at its best. Its probing analysis of the "terrible ambivalences" and "tremendous ambiguities" (p. 11) of living and coping under a military occupation shatters the ideologically rigid moral framework that has generally posited a simplistic polarity of collaboration and resistance. Brook compellingly takes on that politically correct view (at least in contemporary China) of collaboration, a "term," he says, that "leaves no middle range between innocuity and damnation, no space in which ambiguity might arise, no reason to look back and ask what might actually have been going on" (p. 10). His exploration of the social and political processes at the most local level of the occupation state reveals the emptiness of such a conception.	1
In many ways a more fitting title for Brook's work might be "Occupation." His five case studies from the Yangzi River delta go far beyond the phenomenon of collaboration to analyze the panoply of disruptive and devastating effects wrought by the occupation experience. In addition, he uncovers more information on Japanese pacification agents than on Chinese collaborators. But despite limited sources, Brook brilliantly details how occupation was a relationship with hosts of meanings, motivations, and consequences for occupied Chinese and occupying Japanese alike.	2
Brook's case studies focus on the three to four months after the arrival of the Japanese pacification teams, and he finds that the process of pacification "tended to be the same everywhere" (p. 30), although there were clear variations, especially in the cities of Nanjing and Shanghai. In his research and analysis of the five sites, a theme, capturing "the tensions and problems that arose within and around the occupier-collaboration relationship" (p. 28), emerged for each.	. . .

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