Tiny flakes of snow fall from a pearly grey sky outside Fan Jianchuan's giant storehouse of history in Anren, Sichuan province. Here, the billionaire developer, obsessive collector and amateur sleuth plans a museum to confront a dark chapter of China's past - widespread wartime collaboration with the Japanese. It has been snowing steadily for a week and the depository is bone-achingly cold.
The high-ceilinged, concrete building is so large an olive anti-aircraft gun from China's anti-Japanese war of resistance, as mainlanders call the conflict that was subsumed by the second world war, sits in the middle of the first floor like an abandoned toy. Archive keeper Chen Hua is upstairs leafing through a silk-bound volume she has pulled out of a tall, glass-fronted bookcase. The book, whose pages open like a fan, is the kind guests sign when they arrive at a fancy reception. In her 50s, Chen looks more like a bus conductor than the keeper of some of the most contentious history in the mainland.
'Look at their writing, how beautiful it is,' she says, turning the creamy pages, fingers slowed by temperatures well below freezing. On each page, in swirling black calligraphy, are flowery words of praise for the Japanese overlords written by members of Manchuria's 1930s collaborationist government. (Manchukuo, as the Japanese rechristened the area, was seized in 1931 and deposed emperor Pu Yi was installed the following year.) Chen purses her lips. 'In Chinese we say wenruqiren [a person's writing shows his character] but evidently, in this case, it didn't. Look, these men were all traitors and they wrote so beautifully.'
More than seven decades after the Japanese invaded central China in 1937 and set up puppet governments across the country, a dusty curtain surrounding the shameful subject of collaboration is being twitched aside by a small band of mostly amateur historians, with some shocking results.
For one, Fan believes the real number of Chinese collaborators, including those in Manchuria, was as high as 2 million, about four times as many as officially acknowledged.
'We know France also had a traitor government, the Vichy government. But by international standards it's very unusual to see such a large traitor force, such a big quisling army and big quisling social force,' says Fan, a chain-smoking, powerhouse of a man with a bristle-cut hairdo and wire-rimmed glasses. As he speaks, fast and with a Sichuan accent, Fan pauses occasionally to drink tea Sichuanese style, straight from the spout of a small ceramic pot.
Some say the actions of these men helped justify torture, murder and oppression on a scale that changed the collective personality of the country, creating hatred and mistrust for Japan that persists today. 'It's because the Japanese had the help, the support, the aid of these traitors that Japan was able to hold out in China for 14 years,' says Fan. 'They supplied them with everything, including grain and money.'
