“The soldiers have murdered, burnt and looted while raping women without worrying about the presence of witnesses.” By early 1938, the Swedish envoy to China, Johan Beck-Friis, was in no doubt that terrible things were happening in the city of Nanjing, occupied by the Japanese Army. Beck-Friis, at the time 47 years old, was stationed…
On July 7, 1937, Chinese and Japanese forces clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, unwittingly setting off an eight-year-long war that only ended with the formal Japanese surrender to the Allied Powers on board the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945. The battle unfolding in the summer of 1937 is one of the…
In December 1937, the Japanese Army captured the Chinese capital of Nanjing and immediately imposed a complete news blackout of events in the city. As a result, the outside world only received scattered information about the massacre of prisoners and civilians that took place both in the city and in the countryside outside its ancient…
Seventy-four years ago, World War Two in Europe ended. In China, which had been at war with Japan for nearly eight years, newspapers reported the European events at great length, but there was little jubilation, either among the public or the political elite. For even though Hitler was dead, his Japanese ally was still firmly…
Curious news was coming out of China’s wartime capital of Chongqing in the summer of 1941. Charlie Chaplin’s famous movie “The Great Dictator” had been banned in Chinese theaters, allegedly in order not to upset the German government, which was upset about the film’s blatant lampooning of dictator Adolf Hitler. This might seem somewhat contradictory,…
When Japan occupied northeast China in 1931 and 1932 and turned the area into the puppet state of Manchukuo, it also took over a minority of several thousand ethnic Russians who had fled their homeland following the Communist Revolution a little more than a decade earlier. Some of these Russians became loyal citizens of the…
On November 4, 1937, the battle of Shanghai was almost over. Japanese forces were closing in on the Chinese defenses in and around the city, and it was considered a question of time before the Chinese Army had to withdraw west towards Nanjing. On that day, C. M. Robertson, a former US Marine and now…
In the months after the Japanese Army occupied Beijing in the summer of 1937, the new administration attempted to introduce a semblance of normalcy. This involved employing local Chinese in many official positions, especially at junior levels. An example of this is the auxiliary police force shown in these photos, which were taken in October…
China has seen tremendous change over the past century, and along with the rest of Chinese society, the transformation of the nation’s military forces has been profound. At the start of the 20th century, the armed forces of the waning Qing dynasty were still only groping their way into modernity, and the new technologies that…
A high-profile trial was taking place in Nanjing in early 1948. In the dock were two former Japanese officers, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, identified as the duo who had engaged in a widely publicized “sword-killing contest” in and around the same city 10 years earlier, during the infamous 1937-1938 Nanjing massacre. During the Japanese…
