Yun Xia. Down with Traitors

Yun Xia’s Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China is the first comprehensive work in English about hanjian, those who were considered traitors during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945) and later prosecuted in public trials. The author covers court proceedings during this so-called “anti-Japanese war,” but with the majority of trials occurring during the postwar civil war period. The focus is on legal actions against hanjian of the Nationalist government in Chongqing and then, after the war, in Nanjing and other cities, where hundreds of highly publicized public trials were held from 1944 to 1947. The book opens with a discussion of terminology and explains why the author is committed to the term hanjian (traitor, or “traitors to the Han Chinese” [232]) rather than a more neutral term like “collaborator,” which is used in the historiography of wartime Europe or colonized Korea. She then proceeds to trace...

China · Economic Justice · Government (linguistics) · Historiography · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Terminology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies