Engendering Contempt for Collaborators: Anti-Hanjian Discourse Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945

Abstract

During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, the Nationalist government in China launched vigorous anti-collaborator movements. It condemned collaborators as hanjian, or “traitors to the Han Chinese,” and organized legal, social, and literary campaigns against them. This article examines the interplay between gender and the crime of collaboration in the context of the Nationalist government’s post-war struggles, public voyeurism, and changing literary trends. Anti-hanjian literature targeted “female collaborators” as a particular category, exposing their relationships with male collaborators and fabricating details of their private lives. Tabloids and popular pamphlets deployed hearsay and rumors to confirm political disloyalty and personal decadence of collaborators, male or female. In this way, issues such as family and sexuality were written into the discourse on war and collaboration. Many anti-hanjian strategies and vocabularies were inherited and taken up during later campaigns organized by the Chinese Communist party.