Social Science Research Council

“Treason and the Reconstruction of Nation in East Asia, 1937-1951”

Japan’s long wartime occupation of much of China and its decades of colonial rule in Korea could not have been maintained without the help of that selfish and malevolent figure: the traitor.  This claim, and this villainous character are essential components of the postwar historiography of these two nations. But how much or little collaboration with the Japanese made for a traitor in China or Korea at the time or in the aftermath of the war? What about now? Who was punished and how? How were they remembered?

My dissertation explores the processes of judicial, administrative, and extralegal political retribution against traitors in East Asia from 1937-1951 and the battles to define, delimit and control the bounds of treason in order to determine what role these struggles played in the reconstruction of nation in the aftermath of World War II. My project takes a comparative and transnational approach incorporating China, Korea and, in a much shorter contrastive epilogue, Japan. My approach will use representative case studies at the national, local, and historiographical level and I will attempt to show how the issue of treason 1) came to play several important but often contradictory roles in the early postwar political struggles 2) influenced competing conceptions of national identity, and 3) contributed to a historical narrative of the immediate past which attempted to account for the harrowing years of wartime and colonial occupation. In this way my dissertation will contribute to a growing body of research on political retribution in the aftermath of World War II in Europe, to our understanding of the huge social and political changes and conflicts in transwar East Asia, as well as the continuing legacies of this issue in China and Korea today.