On Reflection | 80 years later: can China, Japan overcome Nanking Massacre’s legacy?
Memory of the mass killings in 1937 sits at the heart of disputes between Beijing and Tokyo today, but the issue goes beyond Chinese anger versus Japanese silence
RECENTLY I was in Nanjing. I had hoped to visit the massive memorial that commemorates the terrible events of December 1937, when Japanese troops entered the city, what was then the capital of China under the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. I discovered that the building was closed in preparation for a major visit and speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, marking the 80th anniversary of the atrocity. However, I didn’t need to revisit the memorial to remember the details of what had happened all those decades ago during the early months of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). The massacre has too often been the subject of variable or partial memories in the region, and it is worth revisiting the facts.
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Armed police take part in a ceremony at the state memorial to the Nanking massacre in Jiangsu province, China. Photo: ChinaFotoPress
The city had been abandoned by Tang Shengzhi, the general charged with defending it to the death, the night before. On December 12, Tang himself had slipped away in a small boat while the city’s civilian population waited for the conquerors to enter. Few expected the Japanese to be gentle occupiers. But the scale of the savagery that the city saw was beyond imagination. The killing and sexual assault of thousands upon thousands of civilians would be remembered, using the city’s older English name, as “The Rape of Nanking”. Nowadays it is more frequently called the Nanking massacre.
Historians from China, Japan and the Western world have no doubts about the reality of the horror unleashed on the city. More difficult has been answering the question of why it happened. Reasons specific to the invasion itself played some role. The troops sent to the city as part of the Japanese Imperial Army were not the best troops that Tokyo had to offer. They had been told that the Chinese armies would crumble before them, but instead found themselves fighting lengthy, savage battles in places like Shanghai.
Japanese troops in Nanking after the city's conquest in 1937. File photo
The cold war also prevented discussion of the killings, as Mao Zedong’s China did not emphasise the massacre as a major issue in its relations with Japan. At that time, it seemed more important to detach Japan from the embrace of the United States, a task achieved in 1972 when premier Tanaka Kakuei visited Mao in Beijing. During much of the 1970s and 1980s, there was significant Japanese overseas development assistance to China, which was – without ever being explicitly stated as such – a kind of compensation for the many war crimes committed by the Imperial Army in the 1930s and 1940s. Things changed in the 1980s. This was when China decided it was time to emphasise the Japanese war record in China. The Cultural Revolution was over, and with it, any enthusiasm for the radical class struggle associated with Chairman Mao. There were hopes of reunification with Taiwan, and emphasising what the communists and nationalists (Kuomintang) had in common, a shared resistance to the Japanese during the war, made more sense that stressing the civil war that had divided them. As a result, a new interpretation of the second world war appeared in China. One of the most important parts of that new remembrance of the war centred on the Nanking massacre. In 1985, the memorial to the massacre opened on the site of one of the mass killings. Ever since then, public memory of the killings has become an evermore prominent part of the commemoration of the war in China, as well as its political interpretation.
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Chinese civilians are buried alive by Japanese soldiers during the Nanking massacre in 1937. Photo: Xinhua
