Iris Chang, the voice of the victims of the 1937 Nanjing massacre
Bronze statue of Iris Chang, in the hall of the Nanking massacre memorial.
© MtBell / CC BY-SA 2.0
Text by: Marine Jeannin Follow
9 mins
Sino-American journalist and historian, Iris Chang in 1997 made a major contribution to the memory of the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) by publishing
The Rape of Nanking
.
This historic essay, which has become a bestseller, gives a worldwide impact to the massacre of 1937, but deeply marks its author who will kill herself a few years later.
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Until then, it was a simple episode of the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945), quickly forgotten, almost anecdotal until the end of the 20th century. The sack of Nanjing was however one of the bloodiest events of the conflict, unheard of by its six long weeks of an appalling surge of violence - 38,000 military and civilians killed according to Japan, 300,000 according to the official report of the authorities Chinese, and 20,000 to 80,000 people raped.
The massacre began on December 13, 1937 with the capture by Japan of Nanking, then capital of the nationalist regime of Tchang Kaï-shek. It was not completed until February 1938. “
When the Japanese troops entered Nanjing, a few weeks after the violent battle of Shanghai, they did so with the desire to punish the Chinese for their resistance,
underlines David Serfass, senior lecturer. in Chinese and East Asian history at Inalco.
Above all, there were no international witnesses then, except for a few businessmen and missionaries.
“For lack of white victims, this Dantesque massacre has little echo outside Chinese borders.
It took 60 years, almost to the day, for a young Chinese-American journalist, Iris Chang, to make the scale of the massacre known to the Western world by publishing
The Rape of Nanking
(Penguin Books, 1997).
In this historical essay, she sets out to retrace day after day the unfolding of the Japanese atrocities and to accurately estimate the number of victims.
Above all, its two clearly stated objectives are, on the one hand, to reactivate the memory of one of the greatest massacres of the twentieth century, and on the other to pay tribute to the Chinese victims of the Nanking sack as well as to those who attempted to come to their aid, like Nazi businessman John Rabe.
Bookstore successes and ideological struggles
These two objectives are largely exceeded. Published in English on November 21, 1997, translated into several languages,
The Rape of Nanking
immediately became a bestseller which sold in four months to more than 125,000 copies, and remained 10 weeks on the
New York
bestseller list.
Times
. Iris Chang is the darling of prime time shows, notably "Good Morning America", which invite her to tell Nanjing in front of an audience stunned by the extraordinary barbarity of the event - and the charisma of the writer.
The young woman gives a long cycle of conferences, visiting 65 cities in a year and a half, and is even invited by Hillary Clinton to the White House. The OCA (Organization of Chinese Americans) names Iris Chang "Woman of the Year", and the community is mobilized around the work to have the United States officially recognize Japanese war crimes. "
This book marked a turning point,"
says Bruno Birolli, former correspondent for the French press in China and Japan and author of the historic essay
Ishiwara: the man who started the war
(Armand Colin, 2012)
. He brought back to the fore an event that had completely gone by the wayside. After him, we will no longer be able to erase the memory of Nanking.
"
Its publication comes as two tidal waves collide in Asia. In 1995, the post-Maoist Communist Party changed its ideological pillar, substituting nationalism for the class struggle. This new, inclusive nationalism now takes into account the Kuomintang, and the Sino-Japanese war becomes the central place of this new memory. New importance is also given to civilian victims.
“
To the heroic stories centered on the exploits of the soldiers is now added a kind of martyrology of civilian victims,”
summarizes David Serfass.
The idea is to present China as the nation that suffered the most during World War II, to legitimize a demand for a rebalancing of the international order.
At the same time, the Japanese right undertakes to erase the memory of the post-war period in order to impose the narrative of a "just war".
"
Iris Chang is immediately caught up in this whirlwind of ideological struggles
", indicates Bruno Birolli.
For these Japanese revisionists, who
a posteriori
justify
the Sino-Japanese war as an attempt to liberate Asia from the yoke of the West,
The Rape of Nanking
is an affront.
In the spring of 1998, the Japanese ambassador to the United States denounced the book publicly, while the Japanese consul in Hawaii, Gotaro Ogawa, lobbied to prevent a lecture given by Iris Chang at the University of Manoa.
A controversial work
The young woman also receives an icy reception from American japonologists. It must be said that his work suffers from factual errors, approximations and prejudices which are severely criticized by its author. “
Iris Chang's book has a very bad reputation among historians,”
admits David Serfass
. The whole part on Japan is extremely problematic. She actually had a fairly essentializing, almost orientalist vision of the Japanese nation, which she describes as a samurai people worshiping violence
. "
According to the thesis of Iris Chang, summarized by the subtitle of the book "
The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
", the Nanking massacre is the result of a premeditated extermination plan by the Japanese government. "
The term" holocaust "is not wrong if we take it in its original sense,
explains Bruno Birolli,
that is to say a sacrifice by fire. But we can not put it on the same level as the Shoah, which was an industrial organization down to the smallest details, when this is a moment of
amok,
of murderous frenzy
. "
The Japanese army had distinguished itself by its acts of brutality at the end of the 19th century, with the Port-Arthur massacre in 1894, where thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were summarily executed.
Structurally, the army's stewardship was indeed seriously failing, forcing the soldiers to pillage for food.
They also had a blank check from their superiors for rape and murder.
“
When the Japanese took a city, they ransacked it,”
says Bruno Birolli.
And the inhabitants, not allowing themselves to be fooled, were for the most part taken to the edge of the sword.
It was a matter of morals more than a pre-established plan.
"
A personal commitment
But what Iris Chang's peers do not forgive her, more than errors and approximations that are all in all fairly standard for a general public work, is what she is: a young woman, beautiful in addition, who is adventure on guarded hunts. “
She was not among the old university sweets,”
recalls Bruno Birolli.
Sino-Japanese history was ground on which it was not meant to be legitimate.
"
Because Iris Chang is not a historian by training, but a journalist. The daughter of two Chinese academics who immigrated to the United States, she was born in 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. In 1989, she obtained her
bachelor's degree
in journalism from the University of Illinois, and even before graduation began a brilliant career as a local correspondent for the
New York Times
. She then moved on to a master's degree in writing at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University and in the process wrote a first noteworthy biography of the Chinese engineer Qian Xuesen.
The Rape of Nanking
is her second work: the writer was only 29 years old at the time.
“
His subjective approach is clearly stated in the book,
” emphasizes David Serfass. And for good reason: Iris Chang's maternal grandparents fled Nanjing in front of the advancing Japanese troops, a few weeks before the bloodshed. Deeply shocked by the family story, she began to learn in American libraries, and realizes the lack of English-speaking resources on the subject.
“
Iris Chang recounts in her book that awareness of this event took place in the mid-1990s thanks to a transnational dialogue within the Sino-American community, through the networks that were formed in the aftermath of the massacre of Tian'anmen from 1989,
says David Serfass.
Passage which, moreover, was completely redacted in the Chinese translation of his book
.
"
Throwing herself headlong into her research work, she goes to China to interview rare survivors - she speaks Mandarin - and unearths the diary of John Rabe, actor and crucial witness to the Nanking sack, whose fate will be immortalized in 2009 by the German-Sino-French film
John Rabe, The Fair of Nanking.
Despite the immense success that followed its publication, or perhaps because of it, Iris Chang suffered the full brunt of criticism from her detractors. “
It was the target of
odious
ad hominem
attacks
,”
says Bruno Birolli.
Attacks all the more difficult to bear as she had devoted herself entirely to this cause, which she had made a personal affair.
The journalist is not afraid to create a scandal, publicly calling the Japanese government to demand an apology for its war crimes and financial compensation for the victims.
The years following the publication of
Rape
were a slow descent into hell for Iris Chang. Subject in 2004 to episodes of nervous breakdown and psychotic disorder, she killed herself on November 9 with a gun, in her car in California. “
At the time, there was a conspiracy theory according to which she was murdered by Japanese agents, who disguised her death as suicide,”
says Bruno Birolli.
My opinion is that she had invested herself in her work to the point of almost becoming a witness to the Nanking massacre.
In 2007, China erected a bronze statue of Iris Chang in the very hall of its memorial. As if the young woman had been the last victim of the Nanking massacre.
French edition of “Viol de Nankin” by Iris Chang, published in 2010. © Payot & Rivages
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Literature
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Second World War