Page 2 of 2 Nanjing wounds bleed 70 years
on By Ronan Thomas
Incident - resulted in Japanese aerial
bombardment of the city. When the international
community protested, Japan walked out of the
League of Nations in 1933.
By July 1937,
tensions were stretched to breaking point. At the
Marco Polo Bridge, just outside Beijing, Japanese
forces fabricated yet another "Incident" as a
pretext to unleash their army on Nationalist
China. Some historians suggest that this, rather
than September 1939, was the real starting date
for World
War
II.
In any event, Japan's advance to the
next target, Shanghai, was unstoppable. Japanese
air superiority was complete; the city was
repeatedly bombed. Mitsubishi A5M fighters, the
precursor to the superb A6M Zero, picked off the
few aging Chinese biplanes sent up against them
with ease. As Chiang's troops retreated, they
carried out a scorched-earth policy to deny the
Japanese all available resources.
From
August to November 1937, the Japanese 10th Army
was engaged in Shanghai, where it met fierce
resistance in bitter street fighting. Pushing on
relentlessly from Shanghai and reportedly
irritated by the delays encountered in the city,
the 10th duly arrived at Nanjing, capital of
Nationalist China, on December 8, 1937.
Three Japanese strike groups - elements of
the 16th, 9th and 6th divisions - led by
Lieutenant-Generals Nakajima Kesago, Matsui Iwane
and Tane Hisao respectively - jabbed forward like
the points of a trident to surround the city after
assaults from the southern riverbank and across
the river itself. Fatally, the Nationalist
defenders locked all the city's gates,
inadvertently trapping hundreds of thousands of
civilians. Chiang and his senior officers managed
to escape before the city capitulated on December
13.
The responsibility for what happened
next is still contentious. The evidence suggests
that an Imperial Japanese decree of August 1937 -
which had removed all legal restraints on the
treatment of Chinese prisoners - was interpreted
by local Japanese commanders as a liquidation
order. The result was the same: little mercy to
Nanjing's civilians and those KMT forces who had
surrendered.
The order was given to
execute all captives, as the Chinese were regarded
as sub-human. In appalling scenes of brutality,
over the next six weeks, the Japanese killed up to
300,000 Chinese. The total is still disputed, but
perhaps a quarter of a million were civilians.
Mass executions of men, women, children and the
elderly took place until March 1938 at several
sites across the city and in the suburbs, by
machine-gun, bayonet, impromptu firing squads and
random immolation on the streets.
Upwards
of 20,000 Chinese women were gang-raped. Japanese
soldiers systematically looted and set fire to
large sections of the city. To several Chinese
historians, this Rape of Nanking remains to this
day a "forgotten holocaust", at the very least no
different from the actions of Soviet liquidation
squads under Josef Stalin or the activities of
Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe. Some
go further, suggesting that more Chinese died at
Nanjing in 1937 - 400,000 - than did Japanese in
both atomic and conventional bombings of Japan
combined.
Regardless, Nanjing's suffering
did not end in 1937-38. The city remained occupied
by the Japanese until war's end in August 1945. By
1947, Allied war tribunals had sentenced
Lieutenant-Generals Matsui Iwane and Tane Hisao to
death for war crimes, Lieutenant-General Nakajima
Kesago died in 1945 of natural causes.
Memories past, rivalry today The
anniversary of the Nanjing atrocities will take
place amid swirling cross-currents in inter-East
Asian relations. Both China and Japan are primed
to mark the atrocity from positions of righteous
anger and unease respectively. On the extreme
political right in Japan, radicals are already
claiming that the numbers killed are routinely
exaggerated by China for political purposes. Some
constitute "holocaust deniers" all of their own.
In Japanese schools it is unlikely that Nanjing
will feature high in the syllabus.
Likewise, communist China, pointing
rightly to the unspeakable horrors of Nanjing, may
be said to be conveniently downplaying the crimes
of Mao Zedong and the existence of China's gulag
political prison system. There is also the
convenient scapegoat of Chiang Kai-shek to mask
shameful feelings over the performance of Chinese
soldiers against the Imperial Japanese Army.
The emotive issue of Taiwan, Chiang's last
stronghold, also sits uneasily in the background.
Elsewhere, Hollywood is getting in on the act with
a major documentary, Nanking, scheduled for
release this autumn. The film focuses on the
actions of several Europeans, including a
high-ranking Nazi official in Nanjing - John Rabe
- who saved thousands of Chinese from Japanese
predation. In Nanjing itself, the popular press is
currently fixated more on the parlous state of the
city's traffic-choked streets than on the coming
anniversary. For now.
But in 2007 the
issue is not merely one of historical
interpretation. Elephantine memories in China,
Japan and both Koreas over historical fact and its
interpretation co-exist with serious new maritime
competition rippling across the Pacific. Last
month, in a speech to Chinese naval officers,
President Hu Jintao called for a larger Chinese
navy - "a powerful people's navy that can adapt to
its historical mission during a new century and a
new period".
The speech points to China's
need for world-class naval-projection capability
over disputed Taiwan - vis-a-vis the US Navy - and
deterrent naval parity with Japan and India. For
its part, Japan, upgrading its navy steadily for
decades under the US defense umbrella, has been
maneuvering more aggressively since North Korea
began testing missiles over Japanese territorial
waters in 1998.
Just this week, Tokyo
upgraded its Defense Agency to a fully fledged
ministry, giving it greater procurement and
strategic capability. Though not a signal that
Japan is set to increase defense spending from the
current 1% of gross domestic product (US$42
billion), it nevertheless shows Japan's growing
determination to raise its profile and play a part
in international peacekeeping operations. Since
2003 Japan has also cemented ties with the US,
adopting a joint missile strategy and specifying
China, as well as North Korea, as a potential
enemy.
Meanwhile, back on land, the fog of
memory and political maneuvering over Nanjing is
set to deepen. In this 70th-anniversary year, the
tensions among injustices past, historical
interpretation and present rivalries suggest that
memories of Nanjing - justly to be remembered and
condemned by all those of goodwill - will infuse
Sino-Japanese relations with an unwelcome flavor.
Ronan Thomas is a British
correspondent.
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