Influence of Nanking Massacre - Essay Example

How Nanking Massacre influenced the past and today’s China? China’s southernmost capital Nanjing, is famous not just for its flourishing economic and urban life and remarkable cultural legacy but also for continually being the place of destructive and inhumane events. Between the sparkling Yangtze and the beautiful landscape of the Purple Mountain, wherein Nanjing can be found, are buried uncountable tales of horrifying savagery and cruelty. Nanjing has witnessed natural calamities, bloody political overthrows, dynastic collapse, and violence all through its history. The 1937 Nanjing Massacre is regarded by historians to be one of the most shocking, ghastly, and revolting massacres perpetrated by Japanese soldiers in the course of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Even though Japan had been gnawing away at Northeastern China for years, beginning with the culmination of the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century and centered primarily in Manchuria, the second war between Japan and China, also called the War of Japanese Resistance, is widely known to have begun after the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident. This event resulted in the eruption of total war between Japan and China. In China, Japan, the United States and the rest of the world, possibly no wartime barbarism committed by the Japanese against the Chinese people is more known far and wide than the Rape of Nanking. Nevertheless, whatever the importance of sheer recognition of the name, the memorial and history of the Nanjing massacre are deeply complicated. The significance and implication of the Nanking massacre have constantly evolved over time. Furthermore, the line dividing illegal violent acts against civilians and war crimes against combatant was unclear. Still, since 1937, scholars in the U.S., Japan, and China have struggled with the Nanking massacre, and, in every nation, over time, new interpretations are introduced. Not totally unforeseen, the known significance and implications of the Nanjing massacre have evolved according to the changing domestic and global political context of the period. The Pacific War and the Sino-Japanese War, from 1937 to 1945, influenced the memory and history of Nanking across the globe. The cold war, the Chinese civil war, and Japan’s downfall, from 1945 to 1971, brought about continuous modifications of the interpretation of the Nanjing massacre in China, Japan, and the U.S. From 1971 to 1989, the Japanese and American acknowledgment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Vietnam War, and the debate over Japan’s history textbooks brought about additional modifications. Since 1989, the emergence of ethnocentrism in China, Japan, and the U.S., the passing away of Hirohito, and the conclusion of the cold war stimulated further revisions in global interpretations of the Nanjing massacre. How the Nanjing massacre changed China’s past and present? The Taiping Rebellion is infamous for being one of the most horrible events in the history of Nanjing, not very much for the rebellion itself, which did not inflict damage on majority of the city’s population, but for the violent subdual of the Taipings by the court of the Qing dynasty. The misfortune that brought an end to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom carried on for a few months, leading to the extermination of a huge number of people. A witness described the demolition of the city immediately after the campaign’s defeat: Now I have come to Nanking. All I see are the evidence and atmosphere of devastation everywhere. According to the local people, while the Hairy Rebels [Taipings] occupied the city they never burned any buildings or slaughtered any people and the populace was as comfortable and peaceful as ever… But when the Hsiang Army seized the city, they killed everybody they saw and burned every house they saw. All women and all wealth were taken away by the Hsiang Army and Nanking will forever be poor. Because of the defeat of the Taipings, Nanjing was not able to keep its position as capital. And then Chiang Kai-Shek made an effort to reunite the authority of the Nationalist government in 1927 and brought back the status of Nanjing as capital. Ten years after, the city would be in complete wreckage. In the long and mostly grim history of Nanjing, the Nanjing massacre is regarded as the most unnervingly brutal and scandalous event. The brutalities perpetrated throughout the Nanjing massacre raised it not just one of the vilest, most rotten, and heartbreaking events of the 20th-century history of China but also an event that could be recalled as “among the most brutal in modern warfare”. Even though several Western periodicals on China talked about the massacre, it was not until the latter half of the 1990s that the occurrences of that time started to draw restored attention, as shown in the circulation of a large number of academic monographs. Simultaneously, the carnage was, mainly for political causes, constantly underestimated in China. It was only in the latter part of the 1980s that the Nanjing massacre all of a sudden, through an evolving PRC political program, started to restore its place within the consciousness of the Chinese people; several of literary portrayals surfaced and movies about the Rape of Nanking were shown in schools and cinemas all over China. As explained by Takashi Yoshida, it was at this moment that China started a program of “nationalizing memory of the Nanjing Massacre” by means of new policies intended to bolster nationalistic education. The barbaric brutality of the Nanjing massacre was an incident rarely witnessed in the history of humanity. The spiritual and physical damage wreaked on the population by the attacking Japanese soldiers were profound and enormous. The several weeks of unceasing looting, raping, slaughtering, and burning that came after the occupation of Nanjing inflicted a massive psychological trauma. The people were bursting with overwhelming horror. After several weeks of nonstop violence, the social structure of the family transformed to a great extent. Life became intolerably tough. In 1938, Professor Lewis S. C. Smythe reported the result of his survey: “11.7 percent of the families remaining in Nanjing, or 5,500 households, could be considered to be incomplete households; of these, 26 percent were headed by women. In the safety zones, the numbers were much higher, reaching 35 percent.” In addition, according to the findings, a mere 9 percent of the population in the whole city had jobs in 1938. The number of families suffering from extreme poverty was massive—94 percent. The seizure of properties and houses, as well as Japan’s power over the economy, caused further suffering to the population. Throughout the Japanese occupation, opium houses and brothels were encouraged by the Japanese on a great extent. The Japanese built numerous ‘comfort stations’, which offered sexual entertainments and amenities to the combatants. For a nation with a huge regard for conventional morality as regards sexual conduct, to witness this public exhibition of sexuality was painfully injurious and alarming to the population’s moral health. Furthermore, “before the Japanese came, the Nationalist government and others before it had outlawed opium smoking and the punishment for drug dealing was death, but within a year of Japanese occupation, the number of opium dens grew like reeds along the river bank.” The comfort stations provided release to the Japanese troops, and the opium houses and brothers were vital ways of enforcing the colonization agenda. They were not merely lucrative, but, more significantly, they softened the willpower of the people to fight, oppose, and to improve themselves. The disaster inflicted by the massacre cannot be portrayed or explained in words. The extremely intense occupation strategies and mindless ransacking raised intense anger among the people of Nanjing against the Japanese. Professor Miner Searle Bates carried out a study in 1939 of 80 individual of different ages, with different jobs and different educational attainments. The findings suggested that “in the next fifty years, the inhabitants of this region would not believe anything good said about the Japanese. The effect of the Japanese soldiers on the lives of individuals and their families—including those who worked for the puppet government—were unspeakably painful.” The memoires of Minnie Vautrin confirmed these findings. As written in her diary about those in her community, “not one person had anything good to say about the Japanese, they hated the Japanese to the bone.” It is saddening that the incidents of the Nanjing massacre have been hurled back to the present. The old survivors and victims of that incident should once more relive those traumatic episodes. Of the roughly 800,000 aged individuals in Nanjing at present, roughly 2,630 have witnessed and lived the Nanjing massacre. Psychologists say that the old people have accurate long-term memory. They are able to recall personal experiences and larger events from their remote past. Those who lived the Nanjing massacre or those who experienced Japanese rule, the impact of their opinions on their families and communities must not be underplayed. If a Westerner were to perpetrate a deed of indecency in China, it would be largely ignored, but if Japanese were to perpetrate a similar deed, it would produce prevalent outrage. The Nanjing massacre started as a particular event witnessed and lived by a huge number of Chinese. The survivors had no idea of the whole event, but were aware that members of the family, communities, and other people had experienced too much suffering. The massacre has been changed from a war outrage experienced by the people of Nanjing on a domestic level to a global representation of agony and misery that, in some way, unites all who related with China and/or resent Japan. Here, the massacre is a solid uniting episode for all the people of China. At some point the massacre has also transformed into a political movement. The Chinese government exploits the massacre for political objectives, and a patriotic sentiment has emerged around the atrocity. This provides the government a strong defense by which to attempt to threaten Japan, and the Chinese government has expressed that it will take advantage of diplomatic intimidations, oppositions, and the media to ensure that Japan grants it the dignity and respect it believes it is worthy of. China was one of the numerous casualties of Japanese nationalism in the past. Today, the nationalistic sentiment of China has become a defense against Japan. Alternatively, China also takes advantage of the massacre to exaggerate the victimization of China. China is a continuously developing country whose influence and power is rising, and it can securely contradict its past victimization and flaw with its current power and resistance to be conquered and oppressed again. Simply put, China exploits the massacre to control both faces of power, that of victim and criminal, and the equilibrium can be indefinite, as seen by the divergences between official and popular sentiments in China. Regional inter-governmental institutions of human rights have been in effect for a short time in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. These regional systems of human rights are founded on regional human rights conventions such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). They are put into effect by such political bodies as the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Council of Europe (Hashimoto 2004). In China, regional political interests on human rights outweigh those of international political interests because regional human rights processes have discovered to be more efficient and valuable in endorsing and safeguarding human rights than the international human rights processes obtainable at the UN (Hashimoto 2004), such as the Committee against Torture, the Human Rights Committee, etc. due to the fact that they cannot merely be opposite to the UN regime but can also express regional identities, such the conditions, priorities, and requirements of the regions (Hashimoto 2004). Regional systems of human rights are normally explained as fundamental components in any successful international regimes of human rights in a conflicted, varied world (Pollis & Schwab 2000). In the domain of human rights, execution of human rights processes has been less effective at the international level than at the regional level. Human rights conventions have made it possible not merely to identify and summarize what rights are but as well as to discover means of implementing them (Pollis & Schwab 2000). This is not to claim that every human rights regional body has been triumphant. For instance, the 1975 Helsinki Accords did not meet the pledge they initially embraced for endorsing human rights in the former Soviet Bloc. Another example is the Arab Commission on Human Rights which has also resulted in negligible progress (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). What is remarkable about China, obviously, is that no regional human rights body, treaty or agreement has yet been established. Founded on regional integration theories, one might have predicted that Chinese leadership would have strengthened (Svensson 2002), either to build a common approach for endorsing human rights or, in the lack of agreement about such approach, would have shape a treaty or agreement providing negligible direction on the issue (Svensson 2002). One of the objectives of the current paper is to attempt and interpret, within the framework of the theory of regional integration, why regional political interests outweigh international political interests in human rights in present-day China. Another explanation of the strong regional political interests in China with regard to human rights is interdependence. The notion of interdependence provides the foundations of globalization theory due to the fact the political economy of the world have encouraged the world political economy to be more inter-reliant than in the past (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). A heightened level of interdependence leads to countries being more susceptible than in the past in considerable extents to developments occurring outside their boundaries. At present, no nation-state can protect itself from international inter-reliance. In this setting, the secluded state is not satisfactory for solving numerous problems due to the inter-reliant character of modern-day China (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). If secluded states, such as China, cannot independently solve complicated and major problems, then it is understandable that regional regimes become more and more essential. For instance, Ohmae claims that nation-states were built to fulfill the requirements of a much earlier historical era (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001). He emphasizes that states are dysfunctional as players in an international borderless political economy. Ohmae refers to the divisions that seem sensible for critical objectives ‘region-states’. Region-states are normal political economic regions created by the invisible hand of the international market (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001). Due to highly advanced communication and transportation technologies, defensive borders are no longer invulnerable to the flow of information and its ability to control public opinion and politics. In this setting, the notion of interdependence provides sufficient clarification why China has been ever more cooperating politically in a regional context. It is hence important to determine the level to which there has been a comparable development in the human rights domain at the regional level in China. Conclusions There are not numerous mentions of Asian political values in the Chinese human rights discourse, and neither there are great deals of really expressed mentions to particular Confucian, or Chinese, values. China supports its assertions to uniqueness more on political and economic aspects than on cultural forces. Its relativist stance on human rights is weakened by its own eagerness to condemn other nations, specifically the US, for neither meeting its own political values or to Chinese political values. The Chinese discourse of human rights is monopolized and governed by the system, which creates the issue of ‘representativity’. It is important that the government of China is supporting a government-to-government discussion, while it does not appear concerned in entering into a discussion with its own citizens. The reality that condemnation of the Chinese human rights record is shown as opposed to Chinese is profoundly alarming since nationalism is emerging, which yet again emphasizes the requirement for a sincerely pluralistic discussion and debate on human rights. However, some deliberation on the part of Western countries is also required to make its work on human rights more realistic. For instance, to this objective it is crucial that the US also concentrate on social and economic rights and not merely political and civil rights. It is also important that problems of human rights are viewed in an objective, unbiased, and consistent way irrespective of where they take place. To use various criteria to various countries function to weaken the core notion of the universality of human rights, of which Western nations have always delighted themselves to be such a forceful champion. References An-NaIm, Abdullahi Ahmed, ed. Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Bell, Daniel A. East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Bell, L.S., A. Nathan & I. Peleg. Negotiating Culture and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Brown, M. Anne. Human Rights and the Borders of Suffering. 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