The Nanking massacre: why Hong Kong and world downplayed atrocity, distracted by New Year’s Eve partying and a minor incident
Few in the colony or elsewhere knew or cared about the horrors being unleashed on civilians in the former Chinese capital by Japanese troops; only decades later did the true scale of the atrocities receive widespread publicity
This weekend, the Nanking massacre memorial complex, in the western suburbs of the former Chinese capital now called Nanjing, will be even more crowded than usual, as tens of thousands of people descend on the site to mark the 80th anniversary of the bloody tragedy that occurred over a seven-week period during the winter of 1937-38.
With the possible exception of the Nazi holocaust and the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japan, the sacking of Nanking was perhaps the most egregious human atrocity of the second world war; yet 80 years ago, few people outside the devastated city were aware of its horrific scale.
“There was a general feeling that what had happened was bad, but the event was very far from having the iconic stature that it has attained in recent decades,” says Peter Harmsen, author of Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City (2015).
Visitors queue for a special exhibition at the massacre memorial in Nanjing. Picture: Stuart Heaver
As the European community in Hong Kong prepared to celebrate New Year’s Eve with champagne parties in the city’s smart hotels and private clubs, the 24 exhausted Westerners left in war-torn Nanking were desperately trying to protect terrified civilians from marauding Japanese troops.
Less than three weeks earlier, after days of fierce fighting in the Yangtze valley, the 6th division of the Central China expeditionary force, under General Iwane Matsui, crossed the Qinhuai river, which forms a natural moat around western and southern Nanjing. On December 13, his forces penetrated the Zhonghua gate in the south of the city and scaled the imposing, grey-brick Ming dynasty walls surrounding the capital. The defending Chinese, realising the game was up and their leaders had already fled, attempted to make their escape through the northwest gate and flee across the Yangtze river.
A man carries the body of a dead child in Nanking after bombing by the Japanese forces.
What followed was a seven-week orgy of dystopian brutality. How many lost their lives has been the subject of political conjecture ever since. China officially says 300,000 were left dead; the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, which investigated in 1946, estimated more than 260,000 were killed; and Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira put the final toll closer to 200,000. But the raw numbers do little to illuminate the random decapitations, killing contests, extensive machine-gunning, unrelenting torture, live burials, burnings and mass rapes.
