H-ASIA
February 14, 2001
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From: Moss Roberts <moss.roberts@nyu.edu>
Subject: Nanjing Revisionism
 

Dear Colleagues:

Permit me to add a few thoughts to add to this discussion, which I found informative and stimulating. It is true that official Japan has been reluctant to come to honest terms with the Nanjing Massacre. And much the same could be said of persisting American official denial with regard to the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian massacres at the hands of several American administrations. These crimes and atrocities, however egregious, are still only a small part of a larger Japanese and even larger "Western" colonialist history.

The Nanjing Massacre was one dramatic high point in the 1931-1941 China War, the entirety of which many Japanese elites have conveniently obscured behind the 1941-1945 Pacific War. In postwar public (i.e.media-influenced) memory the Japanese have allowed themselves to see themselves as losers to (even victims of) the powerful Americans and their bomb, and let the preceding ten-year stalemated China War fade from memory.

The occupying Americans increasingly encouraged this split-level thinking, especially as the victory of the Chinese communists approached. The coming to power of the new Chinese government made the WWII sufferings of the Chinese politically awkward. Unwisely, Truman decided not to recognize the new Chinese government; instead he upgraded Japan to strategic asset.

Behind Japan's aggression of 1931 lies its history of cooperation with British colonialism in East Asia, an arrangement that took formal shape in 1902 with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Impressed with Japanese prowess in the 1895 War and the Boxer uprising, the British helped the Japanese advance from potential colony to potential colonizer. The completion of the annexation process for Korea in 1910 went forward in this context. WWI was a golden opportunity for the Japanese to make a big move in China: the 21 Demands.

Although the Western colonialists and Japan were moving into opposition by the early thirties, relations were still good enough for English and American authorities to tolerate Japanese aggression in China so long as their investments were protected by the Japanese. It was mainly the missionaries who cried out then on the human level. To the British and American governments in late 1937 Chinese nationalism still looked more threatening than Japanese colonialism, and so they continued to give Japan material and political support. In the film Judgment at Nuremberg Maxmillian Schell, playing defense attorney for a Nazi jurist, invokes a wide range of responsibility for what the Nazis had wrought. The same logic applies to the Nanking Massacre. The Japanese do not have exclusive responsibility.

In December of 1938 however, a full year after the Massacre, the prescient President Roosevelt arranged for a 25 million dollar loan to the Nationalist government. This marks in my view the turning point in US policy, from tilting to Japan to tilting to China. John Boyle's CHINA AND JAPAN AT WAR 1937-1945 is worth reading on this subject. Roosevelt could foresee the doom of the British empire in East Asia at the hands of the Japanese, and he wanted the Americans to assume a larger role there. He was also profoundly anti-colonialist. Nonetheless Roosevelt was not able to turn policy fully around until Pearl Harbor. Therefore, it is in my view a mistake to apply the political configurations after Pearl Harbor to the thirties, and even 1940. For most of the thirties the only serious opponents to Japanese expansion in China were Russia and Germany (a telling but rarely remembered detail that explains John Rabe's political role

during the massacre without in any sense detracting from his personal heroism). German opposition to Japan's China campaign ended in 1938 with a Reichstag vote to recognize Manchukuo. (The Germans had too much to do in Europe now.) Rabe returned home in early 1938 and was told to shut up and put his films away.

The tragedy of the 2nd half of the 20th century in Asia is that Roosevelt's anti-colonial vision was thwarted by Truman and Byrnes, his Secretary of State. The rise of Dean Rusk is another part of the tragedy. Even as the Americans were moving to hold war crimes [trials?] for the Japanese, they were simultaneously helping the French return to Vietnam, in 1945 not 1950, i.e. well before the Chinese Communists took power. Truman was also quietly assisting the Dutch to maintain their hold on Indonesia, and preserved much of the Japanese colonial structure in South Korea, an important cause of the civil war that erupted in 1950. And in China Truman threw his support to the feckless Chiang regime. This whole pattern of events makes one wonder if the Cold War in Asia was not in reality the unexceptional continuation of colonialism by another name.
 
 

See Chalmers Johnson's recent BLOWBACK and Bruce Cumings PARALLAX VISIONS for further exploration of these problems.