One of the most contentious questions historians of modern China have to deal with is collaboration during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). Yun Xia's Down with Traitors examines hanjian (“traitors to the Han Chinese”) who collaborated with the Japanese during the war and, according to Xia, became “real threats to national security” (p. 30) and “the reflexive ‘others’ in the minds of the self-consciously patriotic Chinese” (p. 5). Xia particularly looks into how hanjian became “a label for criminality,” how hanjian at different levels of the political and social order were punished, and what the purges of hanjian by the state and at the grassroots level tell us about China's efforts to modernize its legal system and build a nation-state.
After explaining in the introduction that she uses the Chinese term “hanjian” rather than the English word “collaborator” because “[n]o English word conveys the severity of...
