ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to reevaluate the military, social and economic circumstances before and after local residents chose to resist or collaborate. It aims to tell the strategy of peasant survival in North China. In 1936, the Japanese forces in North China were enlarged to twice their original size. Kouzi was a small hamlet that lay tucked on the northern foot of Mount South in the Jiaodong Peninsula. Flood, banditry and poverty made rural North China a cradle of heterodoxy and rebellion. Peasants in North China had long been prepared for outside threats with a developed strategy of survival. The study of wartime collaboration in China is not as rich as its European counterpart. The existing scholarship on the Chinese collaboration concentrates on several case studies in the Yangtze River Delta. Regardless of the wartime circumstance of violence, almost every judgment made from the top down is inclined to be a rejection of human dignity rather than a salute to it.
