Down with Traitors

"Xia has done a good job of collecting primary sources and offering a persuasive analysis of a neglected topic. Her work should be deemed as a pioneering project, which enriches our comprehension of the complicated wartime situation and its impact upon postwar Chinese society. . . . This book, without a doubt, is a contribution to modern Chinese history. It could be adopted as a supplementary reading for Chinese and East Asian history courses."—China Review International: A Journal of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies

"Yun Xia's perceptive study traces the legal definition and the political usages of the profoundly emotive word hanjian (traitor). She looks at the years of the Resistance War and shows the ways in which the designation was used as China's political world was increasingly polarized."—Diana Lary, author of The Chinese People at War and China's Civil War

"Deeply researched and intriguing. Yun Xia details the scope of the traitor trials, which dwarfed the war crime trials of the Japanese."—Barak Kushner, author of Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice

"Wartime collaboration breeds treason trials—but trials in turn create collaborators by defining and punishing them. This book, the first in English, reconstructs the tangled political and legal processes in China that singled out those charged with aiding the Japan during the war, and that went on to influence mass campaigns after 1949."—Timothy Brook, author of Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Chinese Elites in Wartime China

"Deftly etching the vast scope and human drama of the Chinese traitors, Yun Xia provides a fine contribution to the literature on anti-Japanese nationalism in China. The book has surprising resonance for scholars of mass campaigns in Maoist China and even has parallels to today's ongoing anti-corruption fervor, where categories of enemies are fluid and legal standards are in flux."—Adam Cathcart, lecturer in Chinese history, University of Leeds