The Nanjing Massacre: Horror, Memory, and the Wounds of History

Introduction

In December 1937 and January 1938, the city of Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, became the site of one of the most devastating atrocities of the twentieth century. Over a period of approximately six weeks, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army swept through the city committing acts of mass murder, widespread rape, looting, and arson on a scale that shocked the world and left a wound in Chinese national memory that has never fully healed. The event is known variously as the Nanjing Massacre and the Rape of Nanking, and it stands alongside the Holocaust and other crimes of the Second World War as a defining example of what organized state violence unleashed upon civilian populations can produce. Estimates of the dead range from the tens of thousands to over three hundred thousand, and the precise numbers remain one of the most contested historical questions in modern East Asian scholarship. What is not in doubt is that the massacre happened, that it was horrific beyond most human capacity to comprehend, and that it continues to shape the relationship between China and Japan in profound and sometimes explosive ways to the present day.

This article traces the full arc of the Nanjing Massacre from the broader strategic context of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the grueling battle for Shanghai, through the days of the city's capture in December 1937, the six weeks of terror that followed, and the long aftermath in the postwar war crimes tribunals, the protracted diplomatic tensions between China and Japan, the extraordinary work of individuals who risked and in some cases gave their lives to document and resist the horror, and the many ways in which the massacre has been remembered, disputed, and deployed in political arguments in the decades since it occurred. It is a story of war at its most brutal and of institutional failure at the highest levels of military command, but it is also a story of remarkable individual courage in conditions of total crisis, and of the complex, still-unresolved relationship between historical memory and national identity in modern East Asia.

The Second Sino-Japanese War: Origins and Escalation

To understand the Nanjing Massacre, it is necessary to understand the war that produced it. The Second Sino-Japanese War officially began on July 7, 1937, with an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge, a historic stone structure spanning the Yongding River a short distance southwest of Beijing. On that night, a Japanese soldier went missing during a routine nighttime training exercise near the bridge, and Japanese officers demanded permission to search the adjacent walled town of Wanping, a demand that the Chinese garrison commanders firmly refused. In the confrontation that followed, shots were exchanged, and within a matter of days what might easily have remained a minor local incident of the kind that had been managed diplomatically many times before had expanded into a full-scale war between Japan and China. The missing soldier, it emerged later, had simply stepped away from his unit temporarily and returned safely before the shooting started, but by then the dynamic of escalation had taken on a momentum of its own and could not be arrested.

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was the spark, but the fire had been building for a very long time. Japan had moved to occupy all of Manchuria in 1931 through a staged explosion on the South Manchuria Railway, an incident engineered by Japanese Kwantung Army officers without authorization from the civilian government in Tokyo. The installed regime of Manchukuo was a Japanese puppet state in all but name, with the last Qing emperor Puyi serving as a figurehead under Japanese military supervision. Throughout the mid-1930s, Japan had been pressing steadily southward into the rest of China, establishing demilitarized buffer zones around Beijing, compelling local Chinese authorities to accept autonomy arrangements that effectively stripped them of real governing power, and engineering a succession of incidents that were used to extract concessions from a Chinese government not yet ready to fight a full-scale war. The government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek faced a genuinely impossible strategic dilemma: on one side the Japanese military was encroaching steadily from the north, and on the other the Chinese Communist Party, whose Red Army had been pushed to the northwest of China after the Long March of 1934 to 1935, continued to represent a direct challenge to Nationalist rule. Chiang's policy of internal pacification before external resistance, while criticized by many Chinese patriots at the time, reflected a realistic assessment of Chinese military weakness relative to Japan. By 1937, however, the combination of Japanese pressure, a dramatic incident in December 1936 in which Chiang was kidnapped by his own generals and forced to agree to a united front with the Communists against Japan, and the genuine fury of Chinese public opinion had made continued accommodation of Japanese demands politically impossible.

The war that followed was one of the most destructive bilateral conflicts in modern history. The Imperial Japanese Army was a formidable fighting force, highly trained, well-equipped with modern weapons, and animated by a military culture that placed an almost mystical value on martial valor, viewed surrender under any circumstances as deeply dishonorable, and cultivated in its soldiers an attitude of racial and cultural superiority toward the Chinese enemy. The Chinese Nationalist Army, despite isolated units of real quality, was deeply fragmented in its command structure, variable in the extreme in training and equipment across its many constituent forces, and still hampered by the legacy of the warlord period that Chiang had spent a decade trying to overcome. Chinese soldiers fought with extraordinary bravery at many points in the war, as the Battle of Shanghai would demonstrate, but the gap in technical capability, combined arms integration, and logistical sophistication was enormous and could not easily be bridged by courage alone. Japan had a modern air force capable of reaching targets throughout China; China had very limited and rapidly depleting air power. Japan had a modern navy that dominated China's coastline and its major rivers; China had no comparable naval force. Japan had modern artillery and nascent armored formations; significant portions of the Chinese army still equipped and fought as they had in the 1920s.