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³ The Republic of China and Japan signed a peace treaty—the Treaty of Taipei—in 1952; two decades later, Japan normalized its relationship with the People’s Republic of China in 1972.

⁴ See, for instance, Deák, István, Europe on trial: The story of collaboration, resistance and retribution during World War II (Boulder: Westview Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Virgili, Fabrice, Shorn women: Gender and punishment in Liberation France, (trans) Flower, John (Oxford, New York, Munich: Berg Publishers, 2002).Google Scholar

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⁷ Yun Xia discusses the insufficiency of using ‘collaborators’ to translate the Chinese term for traitors, which is hanjian (literally ‘traitors’ to the Han people) in Xia, Yun, Down with traitors: Justice and nationalism in wartime China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), pp. 7–12Google Scholar. When it comes to collaboration, there is no exact counterpart in Chinese, and the closest one would be tongdi, literally ‘colluding with the enemy’. The Japanese term is 協力, kyoryoku, which carried the same connotation as collaboration, so we retain the use of collaboration when discussing the problem in the Asian-Pacific theatre. Collaboration offers a fairly literal translation for the Japanese term kyōryoku.

⁸ For instance, Hoffmann calls for looking at collaboration not from the viewpoint of Franco-German relations but from that of Franco-French relations: Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘Collaborationism in France during World War II’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 40, no. 3, 1968, p. CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brook, in his analysis of why some local elites collaborated in wartime China, observes that the occupation provided ungratified local elites upward political mobility that was not otherwise available to them: Brook, Timothy, Collaboration: Japanese agents and local elites in wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹² Chihyun Chang and Chiu-Ya Kao, ‘Cosmopolitan collaboration and wartime collaborationism: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service and its staff, 1932–1941’, in this Forum.

¹³ Xia, Down with traitors; Xia, Yun, ‘Traitors in limbo: Chinese trials of White Russian spies, 1937–1948’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 49, no. 6, 2021, pp. 1096–1112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁷ Kalyvas, ‘Collaboration in comparative perspective’.

¹⁸ These five regimes were the Nationalist government in Chongqing (the Chinese Communist Party also belonged to this group as it formed the second United Front with the Nationalist Party), the Reorganized National government in Nanjing, the Northern Political Council, the Mongolia-Xinjiang Joint Government, and Manchukuo.

¹⁹ Taylor, Jeremy, ‘Cartoons and collaboration in wartime China: The mobilization of Chinese cartoonists under Japanese occupation’, Modern China, vol. 41, no. 4, 2015, p. .CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²⁸ Zanasi, ‘Globalizing hanjian’, pp. 731–751.

²⁹ Yong, Liu and Yi, Li (eds), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue biannianshi: 1895–1949 (A chronological history of modern Chinese literature) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2017), vol. 5, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

³⁰ Sartre, The aftermath of war, p. 9.