The Sino-Japanese War and the Nanjing Massacre: History and Memory

Between 1937 and 1945, China fought a war against Japanese invasion. The war was the result of a long term goal of the Japanese military to create an empire of colonies resembling the imperial powers of Europe. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy visited Japan on behalf of the U.S. president Fillmore, asking the Japanese to open up trade to the U.S. Since then, Japan underwent rapid changes industrially, socially, politically, and militarily. By 1895, it outpaced China in its military development and defeated the Chinese North Navy on the Yellow Sea between China and Korea. It embarked on a path of colonial expansion, first annexing Korea and Taiwan, then moving on to Chinese Manchuria that is adjacent to Korea. In 1904-1905 it fought a war with Russia over Manchuria, ending it with a draw which considerably shocked the Western world, and earning the Japanese both the nickname "Yellow Peril" and a degree of respect in the community of international powers. In the late 1920s, the international economic depression severely affected the Japanese economy, leading to renewed militarism of expansion: military officers mobilized the starving peasants to join the army and help Japan acquire more land and food in China.

1. Against this background, heightened Japanese military activism and the road to war. 

1. Assassination of Zhang Zuolin(1928) In 1911, China became a republic. The Chinese thought that with a constitutional government they could better unify the people to make China strong. But the reality was just the opposite. The abdication of the last emperor was accompanied by a warlord--someone who is a military general and rules by military power--becoming the president of China. President Yuan Shikai quickly found that even with military clout in northern China, he could not effectively control the whole of China. Meanwhile, his violation of the constitution, including dismissal of the parliament and assassination of a leading member of the Nationalist Party, led to military confrontations between him and the Nationalist Party members. Warlords in the south dreamed of autonomy from Yuan's rule in the northern capital of Beijing. China remained disunified, with two co-existing governments, Yuan's in the north, and a self-proclaimed government by the Nationalist Party in Canton, in the south. From 1926 to 1928, however, the Nationalists, in a strategic alliance with the Communists, marched north to unify China, ending the era of warlord rule. The Nationalist Party made itself the government of China, and relocated its capital to Nanjing (Nanking). The unification of China under the Nationalist government came as a shock to the Japanese, however. The Japanese had long believed that they could secure their interests in China so long as China remained weak and divided. They sought to persuade Zhang Zuolin, the Manchu warlord, to secede from China and established an independent kingdom of Manchuria that Japan could control. Zhang's non-compliance with Japan led to his assassination en route from Beijing to Manchuria by the Japanese Kwangtung Army in 1928. The leaders of the Kwangtung Army (named after the Chinese region of Manchuria as the army was specially to protect the lives and property of the Japanese there) went unpunished by the Japanese government. This sent a message to the Japanese army in China that they could do as they wanted. 2. The Manchurian Incident (1931) It was a plot by the Kwantung army to take over Manchuria in the face of Manchuria’s reunification with China. Without informing the civilian government of Japan, the army initiated a battle with the Chinese troops in Manchuria, took over the region, renamed it an independent country and helped put the last Manchu emperor on its throne. Manchuria was lost to China and thousands of Manchurians left for other parts of China. The Nationalist government ordered withdrawal of Chinese troops from Manchuria because it was not ready to fight Japan yet. 3. The Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) In July 1937, shots were exchanged between Japanese soldiers stationed outside of Beijing (Peking) and Chinese soldiers; the Sino-Japanese War had formally begun.  In mid-1937, the Chinese Nationalist troops put up a stiff resistance in Shanghai, which angered the Japanese. In late 1937, after they reached Nanjing (Nanking), the capital of China, the Japanese troops decided to revenge and carried out a massacre of hundreds of thousands of people. The Nanking Massacre lasted for over a month, and the statistics of the Chinese casualties differed widely on the Chinese and Japanese sides. The Japanese insist that almost all killed were armed soldiers, and the Chinese argue most of the killed were civilians and soldiers who had surrendered. This difference in interpretation also has much political implication: for the Chinese, it illustrated Japanese atrocity, and for the Japanese government, up until recent years they were never fully faced with their war guilt in China, and so they did not want to admit killings other than permitted by international law in times of war.

2.Timeline:

July 1937-Aug.1945: the Sino-Japanese war (which the Chinese call the eight-year war). June 22 1941: Hitler's invasion of the USSR. June 23-July 1941: Japanese peaceful occupation of Indochina. July-Nov.1941: US freezing of Japanese assets in the US and total embargo on oil and gasoline exports to Japan.  Dec.8 1941: Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor. Dec. 1941: Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya following Pearl Harbor.

3. History and memory.

The history of the Nanking massacre has been further complicated by various political motivations. As Perry Link pointed out in his preface to the book, the Chinese Communist government (1949-now) encouraged and discouraged a discussion of it at various times: the diplomatic and trade relationship between Communist China and Japan, as well as fear that anti-Japanese popular sentiment would also turn against the Chinese government, prevented the Chinese government from any official discussion of the Nanking massacre.(Li, pp.xii-xiii) On the part of many Chinese, including Chinese Americans, the memory of Nanking could also be applied for personal purposes, such as an integral element of being Chinese, who are heirs not only to a four thousand year civilization, but also heirs to the Chinese Holocaust by the Japanese. (Link, in Li, xv-xvi) In his chapter "The Nanking Massacre as a Historical Symbol," (Li, pp.3-9) Ian Buruma further pushes the argument of how memory is used to further various purposes: political, personal identity, and others. From a methodolgical point of view, Buruma also points out how those who rightfully feel indignant that the Nanking atrocities have not received due publicity may have also abused its use as a symbol of Japanese militarism. The indignation over the atrocities might have led some to use language of hyperbole and to accusations such as "the Nanking massacre has been ignored and scarcely mentioned" which was historically untrue, as it was reported by the Europeans and theJapanese themselves, and made a focal point during the Tokyo war trials after the war was over. And even though the Japanese government tried to suppress the truth of Nanking, Japanese writers, journalists, and political activists have not. (Li, 5-7) Buruma also argues that what belies the fight over whose memory is right about Nanking are the symbolic use of Nanking as the evil of Japanese militarism by not only the people of Japan and China, but also the Chinese government, and the latter often does so in a strategic way to achieve certain political effect. Thus the Chinese government's charge against Japanese militarism over the Japanese Ministry of Education's revision of the school textbooks' use of the word "invasion" of China to the phrase "advance into" China came at the opportune time when a Japanese trade delegation had gone to Taipei, capital of Taiwan, where the government was the Nationalists, archenemy of the Chinese Communists, who fled to Taiwan after losing the civil war (1945-49) to the Communists. (pp.8-9) Buruma also furthers Link's argument at the preface that very often, the memory of Nanking (incorrectly) becomes the rallying point for Chinese Americans for their identity: as cultural differences are more and more reduced to insignificant things such as food, collective self-pity can also become a rallying point for a cultural identity. The other reading for this week, by SUN Zhaiwei (Chinese last names come first) titled "Causes of the Nanking Massacre" (Li, pp.35-46) presents the Chinese side of the story. Sun argues that the Japanese atrocities in Nanking was first of all not a random event, but the climax of a series of atrocities in the Sino-Japanese war of 1937, and also reflected a pattern of atrocities in the history of Japanese invasions of China. On the other hand, Sun does not trace the origin of the atrocities to a systematic planning of the Japanese government or army, but attributes it to Japanese militarism, including indoctrination in the military, Japanese soldiers' desire to revenge after suffering heavy losses in taking over Shanghai and Nanking, and what Sun sees as the wrongful policy of the Nationalist troops defending Nanking to disband and merge with the civilian population, giving the Japanese the excuse to search for troops among and randomly kill civilians. Sun's piece represents to a certain extent the search for a historically sound explanation of the Nanking massacre, an approach informed by recent de-politicization in Communist China that we will deal with in later weeks, and a critical attitude toward the Nationalist troops, a position that has long been upheld by the Communist government on mainland China that the Nationalists did not put up an effective resistance against the Japanese.