The first three quarters of the article is a very sensible promotion of the use of primary sources in history classes as opposed to complete reliance on a single textbook. However, I was pretty much shocked at the last section of the article which seems to be pretty extreme pro-german anti-american propaganda. To sum it up, Lung quotes two german students who studied in America to criticize American history as being “too short” so that they don’t look at the big picture, and also that americans consider batman to be an important historical character.

I know that Lung spent a great deal of time in Europe and was at one point married to a German, but I’ve never seen something so biased from her as this article.

I actually don’t think there is much difference between the meaning of some of these words and I have seen writings in the historiography and literature of treason which use some of them interchangeably without regard for their specific historical differences. The word “hanjian” is one of the more unusual and complex words in what I think is a remarkably universal archetype. However, I would be interested in examples that contradict me on this.

Traitors are often called a “Judas,” for example, without any consideration of whether or not the traitor was carrying out God’s (or someone else’s) plan. The role of Judas himself has that very important feature, but the role of others called by that name usually lack it.

I’m not sure about the Arnold case since that is US-specific case and I haven’t looked much at how Arnold’s name gets used.

As for “my own” Norway’s Quisling – it might first be interesting to note that Norwegians called him a Judas (at the time, BBC Radio had not quite yet succeeded in getting his name into the English language, but that would only take a few more months of propaganda broadcasts, and mentions in The Times). Quisling was a former defense minister who even invaded a completely uninhabited eastern Greenland in 1931 (I like to call it the “other Manchurian incident”, and is the topic of a paper I would like to write some day) which almost ended up sparking a war with Denmark (international court decreed Denmark was right, and Norway relented – one of the last great peaceful settlements of an act of military aggression in the ’30s on the basis of international law). Invading Greenland is pretty pathetic but the point is, he wasn’t quite as pathetic a figure as many of those who his name would be associated with in the future but a power hungry and highly ambitious politician who captured the admiration of the nobel prize winning Knut Hamsun. His name however, did come to mean exactly what you say it did, but by merging with images in several thousand years of literature on treason stretching back, at least, to Ephialtes at Thermopylae and every reference to a Greek who unlocked the front gates of a besieged city. Whatever their personal character and personal circumstances was like, the fact of their treasonous act was often (there are important exceptions, even in the writings of Herodotus, where that rare figure, the “noble traitor” appears) sufficient to not only condemn them, but also often sufficient to create the image of a hunched over, sleezy, selfish toady.

Your translation is much better and I perhaps left the impression that I thought Lung had removed all nuance, when she doesn’t – indeed I believe she wanted her article to add it. My main issue is with her focus on his secret work for the Nationalists (thereby keeping judgment entirely in the realm of what contribution he made for the national cause) and tragic death while not mentioning some key facts about him.

I think that may be part of your problem with what Lung is saying. He is claiming, I think, that Yi is not a hanjian because his death was pathetic. I find the standard uses of the term hanjian to be troublesome since it always seems to connote someone with no un-evil qualities at all, and so if Yi was even briefly pathetic he can’t be a hanjian. I don’t think that the fact that some of these people were facing an ugly set of choices justifies what they did, but like Brook I’m not sure it gets historians far to be prosecuting attorneys or defense attorneys in hanjian court. Even in a lot of the words we use in English you can see different levels of meaning, were hanjian only gives you one

Quisling – seems (to me) to connote a pathetic weasel who could not be expected to do much else
Benedict Arnold – served the nation before betraying it and supposedly returned to his allegiance at the end (Wang Jingwei should have paid attention to this)
Judas- Carried out God’s plan. It was his nature and he could do no other.
fifth columnist -Is loyal to something, but not us.
collaborator -No good connotations at all, and thus Brook does not use it.

I assume you have thought a lot more about this than I, so I would be interesting in hearing what you think of Brook.

Along these lines I have one minor quibble with the translation Lung says 不见得是个多“坏”的“坏人 which Song translates as “was really not a very “bad” person” but might be translated as “should not be seen as the most bad of bad people” which makes his views a bit more nuanced.