China yesterday marked the 84th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed by Japanese troops in and around the former Chinese capital.
A People’s Liberation Army honor guard bearing large funeral wreaths marched slowly past a memorial showing the figure 300,000, China’s official death toll in the events of December 1937, as solemn music played. Troops, students and 3,000 attendees then stood at rigid attention to observe a minute of silence.
Addressing the gathering, Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan (孫春蘭) said they had came together to “learn from history and open up a new chapter of our future.”
Photo: AP
The ceremony aimed to “showcase our lofty commitment to a peaceful development path,” said Sun, the only woman on the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo.
In 2014, China’s top legislature designated Dec. 13 a national day of remembrance for massacre victims. Survivors, just 61 of whom are still living, were among those observing the date.
The Xinhua news agency Web site appeared in black and white to mark the occasion, while popular online shopping and social media sites such as Taobao and WeChat displayed black backgrounds.
In 1937 and throughout World War II, the Communists were based at Yanan in northern China, far from the front lines, while most of the fighting and dying was done by Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Nationalist forces backed by the US.
A 1946 international postwar tribunal concluded that at least 200,000 civilians were killed by Japanese troops in a weekslong frenzy of murder, rape, looting and arson after Nanjing — China’s capital at the time — fell on Dec. 13, 1937, following bitter street fighting in Shanghai.
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