Hanjian

Han is the majority ethnic group in China; and Jian, in Chinese legal language, primarily referred to illicit sex.

The modern usage of the term stems from the Second Sino-Japanese War in which circumstances forced political figures in China to choose between resistance and collaboration.

[2] There tend to be two types of hanjian, or collaborationists, when observing the era of the Sino-Japanese War: “the educated and intellectuals, who simply wanted to get power and wealth for themselves, and the poor and uneducated, whose poverty drove them to collaborate and whose ignorance saved them from even thinking they had to justify what they were doing.”[3] Due to this notion and the modern ambiguity of the term, each of these two categories had various motives with the majority being different but some overlapping.

[7] Because martial law was enforced, formal trials were not necessary, and the condemned were executed swiftly, while thousands of men, women and children watched with evident approval.

Popular anti-hanjian discourse, however, paid particular attention to “female collaborators” and deployed a highly gendered vocabulary to attack hanjian suspects of both sexes.

Complementing the legal purge of collaborators, such literature brought extreme pressure on individuals targeted as hanjian and influenced how political crimes should be exposed and transposed onto other aspects of social life.