The forgotten part of China in WWII: Nanjing massacre

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, starting from Shanghai, they did not expect strong resistance from the Chinese military which angered as they expected to be an effortless fight and victory. This was provoking for the Japanese as they even boasted about conquering the whole of China in a few months into the war. The lengthening of the wartime due to the resistance by the Chinese troops infuriated the Japanese which aggravated their desire to take revenge on the Chinese that was achieved in Nanking.

Before the arrival of the Japanese troops, words had already spread that they are committing killing contest and pillaging their way through China. As a result, most of the citizens moved to the Nanking Safety Zone, which was set up by the Western businessmen and missionaries, in order to find refuge and hideout.However, the Japanese declined the formal request of setting up a safety zone in Nanjing. Nevertheless after invading Nanjing choose not to target the safety zone so as to avoid conflict with foreign countries like America, Britain and even Germany. But as time went the Japanese suspected that Chinese soldier have been disguising as refugees they started breaking in and taking anyone who resembled soldiers. The whole incident has lead to claims of Japanese to have killed at least 300000 deaths in Nanking as stated by Chinese and 200000 civilians and soldiers as stated by the Japanese (Fogel, 2002).

The Japanese started by eliminating the Chinese soldiers who surrendered. To the Japanese, submitting to your enemy is regarded as an of cowardice and humiliation considering that they were drilled with concepts like military honour from childhood. Thus they looked at the Chinese Prisoner Of War (POW) with utter disrespect and even worthless and subhuman. Besides, if any men survived, they were later buried alive, mutilated, burned to death, killed by cold(Iced) and animals (Chang,2015).

Later, after finishing their task of killing all the surrendered POW, they turned their focus on the women and infants of Nanking. Women ageing from 8-70 were sexually abused and infants were slaughtered with their intestines and body parts being cut off. Around 20000-80000 Chinese women were raped (Chang, 2015). Even pregnant women were not spared as their fetuses were ripped for mere amusement, raped and killed to death.

Nanjing massacre has been a controversial event as many parts of the incidents still is debated on and there are many underlying aspects, including politics, for the event to have taken place hence it made me quite interested due to the fact Sino-Japanese relations still remains tensed after the end of the massacre and world war II.

Also, the fact that Nanjing had a safety zone for their citizens but later the Japanese carried out killing sprees and competition including raping the women and execution of infants and elderly regardless of their background and status. This brings question on the motive, goals and reason the Japanese executed such inhumane acts as well as the necessity of carrying out rape on the women and killing spree to gain full control over Nanjing instead of some other less brutal medium.

In this project, I want to explore the degree of violence the Japanese used on Nanjing(uncensored by Japanese) which made the superpower relationship strained to this day. Also, the fact that part of the city was first declared a safety zone but was later targeted by the Japanese brings about the question on the reason which made them choose to carry out the acts. Lastly, I want to explore the necessity of genocide in order to understand with what intention did the Japanese carried out the such acts on the Chinese citizens.