Prominent scholarship on the notion of treason in modern China focuses on the ethnic character of betrayal in terms like
hanjian (“one who transgresses against the Han”). It thus emphasizes a Chinese understanding of the national community as primarily an ethnic one, the boundaries of which sharpened with the Japanese invasion of central China in 1937. I challenge this interpretation by focusing on the transformation of treason as a legal concept under the Nationalist Party (
Guomindang or
Kuomintang) in laws, journals, and administrative rules before and during World War II. Continuing pre-war trends borrowing from German, Japanese, and American debates on legal exceptions and emergency laws, which suspend the normal legal order so executive authorities can face existential threats to the state, the Nationalists redefined treason as a betrayal of the state in particular and the object of a legal competence, rather than a moral or ethical problem.
By 1941, multiple governments made claims to represent the Chinese nation at war, including the Nationalist Party in southwestern Chongqing (Chungking), the Communists in North China, and the collaborationist Reorganized National Government in occupied Nanjing (Nanking). International recognition did not clarify the issue of legitimacy, as the Allies supported the Chongqing government and the Axis backed the puppet regime in Nanjing. In such an environment, the Nationalists increasingly made state loyalty, as defined in law and determined through state investigation, a precondition for political inclusion. In tracing this development, I join recent scholarship examining statism, rather than nationalism and ethnicity, as a dominant force shaping political identity during China’s World War II.
