Lo Jiu-jung, 2013, Her Trials: Contextualizing Loyalty and Disloyalty in Modern China from the Gendered Nationalist Perspective, 364 pages, Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.

This book uses the wartime stories of five women to illustrate how questions of loyalty and disloyalty were woven into the nationalist discourses pivotal to modern Chinese conceptions of the state and the people. The fact that China was embroiled in both a nationalist war and internecine power struggles made loyalty to the state a notion both well-entrenched and extremely tenuous. While women accused of treason constituted only a negligible percentage in post-war trials when compared to their male counterparts, in reality they assumed much more versatile personae reflecting the entanglements built into discourses of loyalty and betrayal. This is because, in addition to the role of “citizen” in which loyalty to the modern state was presupposed, they were also wives, mothers, lovers, daughters, etc. In traditional Chinese society, women were largely excluded from the political arena. The fact that some were now publicly denounced as traitors speaks to the immense changes that China had experienced. This book presents these female life experiences first as stories per se, then puts them in gendered nationalist perspective, and finally treats them in the context of discourses about loyalty.