The Usefulness of Division: The Nanjing Massacre in Sino-Japanese Relations


Of what use is cross-national conflict?

The rise of Chinese nationalism has long been a red flag to many who believe that its growing mass appeal may lead China eventually to take some aggressive military action on the world stage. Chinese nationalistic sentiments have been directed toward, among other peoples, the Japanese, whose past imperialistic campaigns against China have formed the basis for the anti-Japanese sentiment that exists among many Chinese today. Although current tensions do not derive merely from events that occurred in the past 100 years, Chinese collective memory of Japanese aggression in the 20th century forms the primary basis for many current anti-Japanese feelings.

Assuredly, recent Japanese incursions into China–beginning in 1915 with the Twenty-One Demands–were plentiful, and entire Chinese cities fell to the Japanese swiftly after the pivotal Battle at Marco Polo Bridge, the event that formally began the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). Approximately twenty million Chinese died during the war, a number that would be a harbinger of the additional tens of millions who would die in the decades that followed. But among all of the violent Sino-Japanese encounters during this war, the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) has recently reemerged as a major point of contention between the Chinese and Japanese peoples and their governments. Fundamental disagreements over the nomenclature of the event, the number of Chinese killed, and those ultimately responsible for the tragedy persist to this day.

But although an outsider may regard such ongoing disagreements as destructive, many Chinese have come to regard the overall argument to have some measure of political utility, a certain amount of usefulness to the Chinese during yet another period of national change. However uncomfortable recalling the massacre may appear to those who lived through it, revitalizing the memory of such a bloody historical event does indeed serve a purpose, particularly with many Chinese, among whom the Chinese-Japanese polemic has been used to strengthen Chinese nationalism as an element that is crucial to modern-day Chinese identity.

In his introduction to a series of essays that discuss the history and the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, Joshua A. Fogel contends that the event “has been appropriated as an ideological tool for nationalist mobilization” by the Chinese.[1] He argues that overseas Chinese, in particular, have played a vital role in taking the events of Japanese-occupied Nanjing “out of context and [elevating] them to untold heights” in an effort to formulate a unified and cohesive Chinese identity that spans the globe.[2] As the school of thought that saw some usefulness in exploitation of the Nanjing Massacre spread into China, the concept found relevance in a land where the communist government had been promoting Chinese patriotism–trivially opposed to “fascist-styled” nationalism–for decades. Once the Nanjing Massacre was distant enough in the memory of many Chinese and the shame attributed to it–i.e. “How could we Chinese allow ourselves to be raped and slaughtered by Japanese?”–became bearable, the Massacre became a powerful and convenient source in recent history from which the new, popular Chinese nationalism could be stoked.

Daqing Yang writes, “many Chinese writings tend to emphasize the Nanjing Massacre as an act of Japanese militarism and aggression in sort of a ‘master narrative’” that holistically condemns the Japanese as a historical antagonist of the Chinese people.[3] The “master narrative” of the Chinese history of “victimhood” is unfortunate, but it has appealed to those Chinese in the vast, worldwide diaspora who have come to “search for an identity without the tools necessary to acquire it, often latching onto negative events in their history as elemental to their identity.”[4] The participants in the evolution of Chinese culture–in China and abroad–have come to regard the Nanjing Massacre as a part of the “emplotment history” of Sino-Japanese relations, a seemingly predictable relationship that necessitates heightened scrutiny and suspicion of the Japanese.

To be sure, this suspicion is not new, but the ability to articulate it in terms of a specific event–the Nanjing Massacre–is. Whereas economic and diplomatic realities kept the stories of the Massacre out of the public domain in the 1950s and 60s, the Chinese government earnestly embarked on “systematic collection of victims’ accounts as historical evidence” in the 1980s, thus making first-hand information about the atrocities widely available nearly 40 years after the fact.[5] It is worth noting that although it took nearly half of a century for the Chinese to investigate the Massacre in a meaningful fashion, some Japanese historians contributed to the documentation of the event in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Japanese government concucted war crimes trials in the late 1940s and were much more willing to take responsibility for the atrocities then than many are now.[6]

Chinese awareness of recent Japanese aggression was further heightened as international lines of communication and trade have opened since the 1980s. Since then, many Chinese have become intimately aware of the disparities between Chinese and Japanese history books over the wartime events, for example. The scandal over Japanese history books is one of the most salient outstanding issues between the two peoples and fuels much of the current tension. History books for Japanese schoolchildren barely mention Japanese incursions into Nanjing, much less the atrocities that Japanese troops committed, including mutilation, rape and murder. The official Chinese estimate attributes 300,000 murders and 80,000 rapes to the Japanese in Nanjing during the 1937-38 period, but Japanese history books neglect to cite those “anti-Japanese” numbers due to the fact that the government aims to instill a sense of “pride in Japan” amongst its youngest citizens through censored historical education.[7]

The growing controversy over the Nanjing Massacre permits the useful polemic to persist in China, where claims of Japanese historical revisionism and Chinese fabrication have further strengthened Chinese-Japanese divisions. Many consider sharp disagreements over the Massacre to be desirable and resist attempts at reconciliation of divergent histories and positions. Yang writes that “a transnational historical understanding would undermine a nation-centered narrative and might be injurious to national pride and identity.”[8] It is thus crucial for Chinese self-esteem and self-awareness for many for such disagreements to be kept alive.

Although the polemic has a use, it is not innocuous to the Chinese nor the Japanese. The proliferation of anti-Japanese attitudes throughout China has threatened the fragile economic and diplomatic equilibrium that has existed in East Asia since Zhou Enlai’s normalization of relations between China and Japan in 1972. On that occasion, the Chinese premier said, “Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide to the future.”[9] With that comment, Zhou aired a voice of skepticism about the Japanese that has since transitioned and transformed into popular anti-Japanese feelings and led to mass protests, diplomatic upsets, and economic tensions through the present day.

When the young generation of new Chinese nationalists recall the events and memory of the Nanjing Massacre, they are citing a powerful part of the complex ideal of present-day Chinese nationalism. In the effort to forge a cohesive ideal of “Chineseness,” common suffering has proved an attractive source from which a modern-day, pan-Chinese identity can be derived. The contempt and envy with which many Chinese regard their island neighbors has been useful in this way, but it is also dangerous. To those who are genuinely concerned with possible aggressive action as Chinese nationalism and power continue to rise, Japanese proximity only accentuates the possible Chinese threat to global stability. Furthermore, the polemic provides for other targets of the anti-Japanese styled directed nationalism to emerge and casts an ominous shadow on the so-called “peaceful rise” that China is currently experiencing.
 
[1] Fogel, Joshua A. “The Nanjing Massacre in History.” The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Ed. Joshua A. Fogel. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000. p. 6.
[2] ibid, 4.
[3] Yang, Daqing. “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry.” The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Ed. Joshua A. Fogel. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000. p. 145.
[4] Fogel, 3.
[5] Yang, 140.
[6] ibid, 139.
[7] ibid, 163.
[8] ibid.
[9] Dirlik, Arif. “‘Past Experience, If Not Forgotten, Is a Guide to the Future”; Or, What Is in a Text? The Politics of History in Chinese-Japanese Relations.” boundary 2, Vol. 18, no. 3. (Autumn, 1991), p. 29.

Posted: Fri - December 9, 2005 at 04:45 PM          

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