Enemy Alien Internment, Decolonization, and the Uprooted Elite of Treaty Port China under Japanese Occupation, 1941–1945

Abstract This article addresses the process of decolonization carried out by wartime Japanese occupation authorities, exemplifying how it played out on the ground in 1940s China with a focus on the ‘uprooted elite’ – that is, the former Western colonists of the treaty ports. After the outbreak of hostilities in December 1941, these civilians were haphazardly categorized as ‘enemy nationals’ and subjected to enemy alien regulations. This culminated in a far-reaching general internment policy from early 1943 until mid- to late 1945, when a bittersweet Allied liberation shut Japan’s ‘Civil Assembly Centres’ down. Despite Western imperialists’ desires to resurrect racial privilege and recapture a modicum of their colonial possessions, the process of ethno-political and socio-economic relegation and replacement initiated loosely under the political schema of Imperial Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ proved to be largely irreversible as post-imperial domestic regimes advanced nationalization agendas. The uprooted elite were not merely passive objects enduring racial upheaval, removal, and ‘repatriation’. They navigated a complex and changing reality, exercising what rights they could in order to try to improve their lot. They benefited from humanitarian aid, administered by neutral Swedish and Swiss consular networks and the International Committee of the Red Cross operating on a global scale.