The Rape of Nanking

The Historical Context of the Nanking Massacre

The fall of Nanking in December 1937 was supposed to end a war; instead, it ignited a seven-week campaign of terror that changed history. While many date the start of World War II to Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Poland, for Asia, the war began much earlier. In 1937, the Japanese military launched a massive assault on Nanking, then the capital of China. What followed was an orgy of violence that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and unarmed soldiers in plain view of the world.

The scale of this massacre is difficult to grasp. Experts estimate that between 260,000 and 350,000 people were killed, a death toll in a single city that exceeded the total civilian casualties of many European nations during the entire war and surpassed the combined deaths from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The methods were uniquely barbaric, involving decapitation contests, live burials, and widespread sexual violence that horrified even the Nazi observers present in the city.

Author Iris Chang first learned of these horrors as a child from her parents, who had survived the war and told her stories of the Yangtze River running red with blood. When she later searched for information in her local library, she found nothing. This absence of records was a riddle: How could one of the worst instances of mass extermination in human history be virtually unknown in the West? The silence was not an accident but a product of Cold War politics. After 1949, both the American and Chinese governments prioritized political alliances over seeking justice. The U.S. wanted Japan as an ally against communism, while Chinese leaders competed for Japanese recognition.

Consequently, Japan escaped the intense scrutiny that Germany faced after the Holocaust. This political environment allowed a culture of denial to take root, where references to the massacre were systematically purged from textbooks. This collective amnesia is a second atrocity, as forgetting a tragedy is like killing the victims a second time. To understand Nanking, one must examine the event from multiple angles: the Japanese military’s planned invasion, the Chinese victims' struggle for survival, and the brave Westerners who stayed behind to create a safety zone.