China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they would later do throughout Asia. Likening their victims to insects and animals, the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred thousand--no one is sure just how many--Chinese soldiers and noncombatants alike were killed. Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives of countless residents of Nanking. She also suggests that the Japanese government pay reparations and apologize for its army's horrific acts of 60 years ago.


From School Library Journal
YA?The events in this book are horribly off-putting, which, paradoxically, is why they must be remembered. Chang tells of the Sino-Japanese War atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in Nanking in December 1937, in which roughly 350,000 soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in an eight-week period, many of them having been raped and/or tortured first. Not only are readers given many of the gory details?with pictures?but they are also told of the heroism of some members of a small foreign contingent, particularly of a Nazi businessman who resided in China for 30 years. The story of his bravery lends the ironic touch of someone with evil credentials doing good. Once the author finishes with the atrocities, she proceeds with the equally absorbing and much easier-to-take story of what happened to the Nazi businessman when he returned to Germany and the war ended. This by itself is material for a movie. The author tells why the Japanese government not only allowed the atrocities to occur but also refused, and continues to refuse, to acknowledge that they happened. She is quite evenhanded in reminding readers that every culture has some episode like this in its history; what makes this one important is the number of people killed and tortured, the sadism, and the ongoing Japanese denial of responsibility. Mature readers will look beyond the sensational acts of cruelty to ponder the horror of man's inhumanity to man and the examples of heroism in the midst of savagery.?Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Even though the Japanese government still refuses to acknowledge the massacre of at least 250,000 Chinese civilians by invading Japanese troops in 1937, freelance writer Chang (the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Associated Press) has exposed in detail the full, terrible account of what happened to the war-torn capital of Nanking. Chang, whose grandparents survived the brutality, first establishes Japan's social hierarchy by martial competition, then shows how the city of Nanking fell, the six weeks of horror following, and the Nanking safety zone created by Americans and Europeans. The book goes on to depict the city's occupation, the judgment day for Japanese war criminals, the cover-up perpetrated by Japanese textbooks, and Japan's self-imposed censorship. The unseen illustrations will certainly complement the vivid description of one of the most horrible massacres of all. This unique, deeply researched book, with its firsthand account, is an excellent choice for larger public libraries and the East Asia collections of academic libraries.?Steven Lin, American Samoa Community Coll. Lib.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Orville Schell
In her important new book, The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents were survivors, recounts the grisly massacre with understandable outrage.


Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai
A gripping account that holds the reader's attention from beginning to end. This meticulously researched book is a moving drama that pays fitting tribute to the Americans and Europeans living in Nanking who risked their lives to rescue the Chinese people from rape and extermination.


Ross Terrill, author of Mao, China in Our Time and Madame Mao
Anyone interested in the relation between war, self-righteousness, and the human spirit will find THE RAPE OF NANKING of fundamental importance. It is scholarly, an exciting investigation and a work of passion. In places it is almost unbearable to read, but it should be read - only if the past is understood can the future be navigated.


From AudioFile
Few know the details of the Japanese invasion of Nanking during WWII. Once a capital city of China, it became a scene of holocaust, rivaling any of Europe's in brutality and numbers. This is not history for the squeamish. Chang unfolds episodes with painstaking detail. She documents facts, reactions and rebuttals and includes a psycho-sociological analysis of the Japanese character to explain (if not excuse) their excesses. With a dry voice, Fields keeps her narrative from overreaction, using a finely tuned ear for inflection to emphasize the worst horrors. This is a real accomplishment as it would be hard NOT to express indignation. Her intelligent performance makes this a remarkable and compelling experience. S.B.S. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Billing itself as the first English-language history devoted to the Japanese Army's 1937 massacre in China's capital, this slight account will by no means be the last word. Repeated references to Schindler's List point to the problem with this overdigested version of the past: It reads like a treatment for a probably inevitable cinema version of the hideous incident. Its economical, blandly shocking anecdotes of crimes against humanity and its cardboard heroes suggest scenes ready-made for screenwritten history. Thus, while rigorous in its moral earnestness, the book is inadequate as a history. After a minimal background chapter on Japanese militarism, Chang, a freelance journalist, describes the Japanese assault on Nanking. The specifics are deeply horrific: Over a period of several months Japanese soldiers killed approximately a quarter of a million Chinese, almost all of them noncombatants, including the elderly, women, and children. But the potential ingredients of a skillfully woven narrative are separated here into lifeless clumps of facts--catalogues of atrocities by kind; tiny summaries of topics of significant contextual interest, like foreign intelligence concerning the massacre; and probably gripping oral recollections flattened into clunky prose (``of the hundreds of people killed that day . . . Tang was the only survivor''). Chang tells only as much as one needs to know to indignantly draw the familiar lessons for humanity--``the frightening ease with which the mind can accept genocide, turning us all into passive spectators to the unthinkable.'' What's needed is to vivify such truths with intense historical reality. Chang fails because he rushes to simplify complex events and to universalize what happened at the expense of a careful, comprehensive appreciation of a world violently destroyed. (photos, not seen) (First serial to Newsweek) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Frederic Wakeman, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Iris Chang's RAPE OF NANKING is an utterly compelling book. The descriptions of the atrocities raise fundamental questions not only about imperial Japanese militarism but the psychology of the torturers, rapists and murderers. Many Japanese have denied that these events ever took place, substituting amnesia for guilt, but Iris Chang's heartbreaking account will make such evasion impossible in the future for all but the most diehard right-wing Japanese extremists.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (Nanjing) and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured, and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity - one of the worst in world history - continues to be denied by the Japanese government. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents in four different languages (many never before published), Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, has written what will surely be the definitive, English-language history of this horrifying episode - one that the Japanese have tried for years to erase from public consciousness. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers who performed it; of the Chinese civilians who endured it; and finally of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese. It was Chang who discovered the diaries of the German leader of this rescue effort, John Rabe, whom she calls the "Oskar Schindler of China." A loyal supporter of Adolf Hitler but far from the terror planned in his Nazi-controlled homeland, he worked tirelessly to save the innocent from slaughter.

FROM THE CRITICS

Adam Hochschild - Salon

Colonial Williamsburg, the meticulous restoration of a Virginia village of several centuries ago, was built in the 1930s. For several decades, tens of millions of tourists enjoyed the spinning wheels, the working blacksmith's and cobbler's shops, the guides in period costumes. But it was not until after 1970 that a visitor could easily learn a crucial fact: Half the population of the original Williamsburg were slaves. Today you can see slave quarters and other exhibits showing what the daily life of slaves was like.

Some horrendous outbursts of cruelty, like slavery, endure for centuries; some are over in a few hours or weeks. But all of them raise two questions. First, what makes human beings capable of mass savagery? Second, what makes great acts of violence remembered or forgotten -- or, as in Williamsburg, officially forgotten for a long time and then abruptly remembered?

Both questions are raised by Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. The 29-year-old Chang published the book in late 1997, then unexpectedly saw it give birth to a storm of praise, denunciations and controversy that still continues. A paperback edition of the book has just appeared.

In brief, the book is the story of the almost unbelievable orgy of violence unleashed over several months by the Japanese army after it occupied Nanking, the capital of Nationalist China, in December 1937. There is dispute about the death toll, but most serious scholars place it in the hundreds of thousands. Chinese men were forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers and daughters. Japanese soldiers gang-raped women by the tens of thousands. They nailed women to trees. They drove stakes through their vaginas. They bound the hands of Chinese men, lined them up in long rows, and machine-gunned them into huge burial ditches. They bayoneted babies in front of their mothers. They buried people alive. Soldiers had "killing contests" and boasted to Japanese reporters of their scores. Some of the carnage was recorded on film. An American missionary (the United States was not yet at war with Japan) took movies, and a colleague smuggled the footage out of the country sewn in his coat lining. Japanese soldiers took still photos, then brought their film for developing to Chinese photo shops where horrified employees, at great risk, surreptitiously made extra prints.

Chang vividly, methodically, records what happened, piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror. Driven mainly by an understandable outrage, she does not do such a good job of analyzing why the Japanese acted with such extraordinary sadism -- not just in Nanking, incidentally, but in so many other places they conquered as well. Although, in fairness, perhaps not even the greatest of philosophers can fully explain the gas chambers at Auschwitz or the spectacle of a Japanese soldier tying a man to a tree and using him for bayonet practice, while other soldiers watch, laugh and take pictures.

The Nanking atrocities were well publicized throughout the world at the time, and are usually mentioned in the standard Western histories of World War II. But along with wartime Japan's other vast, wanton sprees of murder, rape and looting, it has drawn far less attention in recent years than the Holocaust, Stalin's gulag and other mass murders of our day. The Rape of Nanking is the first book on the subject in English in more than 50 years. Many Japanese still deny that so much blood was shed. Six conservative historians held a Tokyo press conference to denounce Chang, and the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Kunihiko Saito, criticized the book as "full of errors, biased and a one-sided view." Imagine the uproar if a German ambassador had denounced Schindler's List as "one-sided."

The most unexpected part of Chang's story, and the reaction to it, has to do with the curious politics of memory and forgetting. In contrast to the extensive war crimes trials in Europe, begun by the Allies and later continued by the Germans themselves, trials in Japan were few and finished very quickly. Confiscated Japanese military records, a potential gold mine of information for war crimes and much else, were returned to Japan by the United States in the 1950s without even being fully copied. The U.S. saw the economic powerhouse of Japan as its key anti-Communist ally in Asia, and, throughout the Cold War, made no effort to force Japan to come to terms with its actions during World War II.

Furthermore, both Nationalist and Communist China, competing for Japanese trade and favor, have been reluctant to press the issue of Nanking and war crimes. Japan is the largest aid donor in the world. Most of that aid goes to Asia; Japan has loaned Beijing many billions of dollars on favorable terms. Although the memory of the rape of Nanking remains very much alive in the city (today known as Nanjing), it was not until 1985 that the government permitted a museum of the atrocities to be built there, and it has repeatedly prohibited demonstrations against visiting Japanese.

Not only did Chang's book become a bestseller, it has been the inspiration for several conferences, a TV documentary, a museum now on the drawing boards in Los Angeles and a planned Hollywood film. If she had written it 20 or 30 years ago, most likely none of this would have happened. What made the difference? Two things above all: the end of the Cold War, and the rising influence, and number, of Americans of Chinese descent. Many of them, like Iris Chang, grew up hearing the stories of events like Nanking, and want to see that history on paper at last.

Publicly remembering painful parts of the past is always a political act, and almost always takes place against enormous obstacles. Those obstacles do not just concern distant places like China and Japan. If Rosa Parks had not sat down in the front of the bus, if Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others had not marched and endured beatings and jail, Colonial Williamsburg would still display no slave quarters today.

Iris Chang - The New York Times

Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it's a natural part after a society has committed genocide. First you kill, and then the memory of killing is killed....I want the Japanese people to know the truth....I want them to know a side of history that isn't properly taught in school. Like it or not, this is a part of their history.

Chicago Tribune

A powerful new work of history and moral inquiry.

Newsweek

[An] unflinching re-examination of one of the most horrifying chapters of the Second World War.

Library Journal

Even though the Japanese government still refuses to acknowledge the massacre of at least 250,000 Chinese civilians by invading Japanese troops in 1937, freelance writer Chang (the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Associated Press) has exposed in detail the full, terrible account of what happened to the war-torn capital of Nanking. Chang, whose grandparents survived the brutality, first establishes Japan's social hierarchy by martial competition, then shows how the city of Nanking fell, the six weeks of horror following, and the Nanking safety zone created by Americans and Europeans. The book goes on to depict the city's occupation, the judgment day for Japanese war criminals, the cover-up perpetrated by Japanese textbooks, and Japan's self-imposed censorship. -- Steven Lin, American Samoa Community College Library Read all 10 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Harper Collins - New Media

Iris Chang has produced a gripping account of a dark historical moment, one that holds the reader's attention from beginning to end. Her meticulously researched book is not only an important contribution to the study of Japan's war to subjugate China, but also a moving account that pays fitting tribute to the Americans and Europeans living in Nanking who risked their lives to rescue the Chinese people from rape and extermination. — Author of Life and Death in Shanghai

Harper Collins - New Media

A powerful, landmark book, riveting in its horror, exposing the mass killing perpetrated by the Japanese army on the people of Nanking in the early years of the Second World War. — Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Harper Collins - New Media

Iris Chang takes the reader on an adventure into a shocking niche of contemporary history. The events in Nanking 60 years ago were a low point in a fratricidal war -- a macabre overture to a war that eventually killed 19 million Chinese. Anyone interested in the relation between war, self-righteousness, and the human spirit will find The Rape of Nanking of fundamental importance. It is also an exciting investigation and a work of passion. — Author of Mao: China in Our Time

Harper Collins - New Media

Compelling and historically truthful. . . . Iris Chang has provided an incredible expose of perverted power and human behavior, from sanity to insanity, from virtuous to depraved. Never have I encountered such a concise and detailed chronology of barbarism as in this compelling history of The Rape of Nanking.. — Author of The Allied-Japanese Conspiracy and Betrayal in High Places