James C. Hsiung

MORE THAN forty-five years have passed since the guns fell silent, signaling the
end of the bloody Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. During those eight terrible
years, the Chinese people endured what was probably the most brutal war ever
fought in the Pacific region, but the story of how they survived has not yet been
fully told. Meanwhile, of course, much has been written about the experience of
other countries and peoples during World War II. The gap relating to China in
the literature of World War II is extremely unfortunate, to say the least.

The attitudes of the principal Chinese parties in this tragic conflict obviously
have had a great deal to do with the perpetuation of this lacuna. Due to their
long-standing mutual enmity, neither the Kuomintang authorities in Taipei nor
the Chinese Communist rulers in Peking can agree on who should get credit for
the victory that finally came in 1945. ¹ Neither party has yet provided very much
detailed and comprehensive information in a form that presents a composite
picture of China's eight-year War of Resistance. Instead, there have been piece-
meal releases of information about particular military campaigns and the publi-
cation of memoirs by a few remaining veteran military leaders.

In contrast, voluminous accounts have appeared in Japan of the glorious
exploits of the Imperial Army during the Pacific War. The Japanese, how-
ever, have no compelling reasons to tell the whole truth about an event that
many among them now much prefer to gloss over or forget. In its controver-
sial textbook revisions of the 1980s, Tokyo sought to play down the aggres-
sive war launched by the Japanese militarists of the 1930s as a mere "forward
advance" in China. ² In early 1988, a member of the Japanese cabinet un-
abashedly proclaimed that the Japanese invasion of China five decades earlier
was not an act of aggression. Although he subsequently resigned under fire
from the opposition, he was forced to do so for his undiplomatic behavior
rather than for his historical inaccuracy. ³ Indeed, in that episode, a group of
forty-one politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic party rushed to his
defense, and a significant number of Japanese were also reported to agree
with him. ⁴ It is an indisputable fact that more innocent Chinese were massa-
cred by Japanese soldiers in the December 1937 Rape of Nanking than Japan-
ese were killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, yet

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