The Rape of Nanking

The Forgotten Terror of Nanking

In December 1937, Japanese troops captured Nanking, the capital of the Republic of China. What followed was not a military occupation. It was seven weeks of systematic murder, rape, and torture that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war. The death toll exceeded the combined casualties of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet for most of the Western world, this event remains almost entirely unknown.

Iris Chang first heard about Nanking as a child growing up in Illinois. Her parents, who had survived the war in China, described the Yangtze River running red with blood and soldiers killing indiscriminately. When she went to her local library to learn more, she found almost nothing. That absence became the driving question behind this book: how could one of the worst mass atrocities of the twentieth century simply vanish from public memory?

The answer, Chang discovered, was not forgetfulness. It was politics. After World War II, the United States needed Japan as an ally against communism in Asia. China, meanwhile, was consumed by civil war and later by a new government eager to build diplomatic ties with Tokyo. Neither side had an interest in pursuing justice for the victims of Nanking. As a result, Japan escaped the kind of sustained international scrutiny that Germany faced after the Holocaust, and a culture of denial took root that persists to this day.

This book reconstructs the massacre from three angles: the Japanese military that carried it out, the Chinese civilians who endured it, and the small group of Western foreigners who stayed behind to document it. Together, these perspectives form a complete picture of an event that the world has spent decades trying to forget.