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Audrey Jiajia Li

On September 3, I watched the live broadcast of China’s military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the victory in World War II. The perfectly aligned formations, the roaring fighter jets, the cutting-edge unmanned combat systems – the spectacle spoke for itself.
Scanning international media, I found commentary interpreting the parade as a show of force by China and Russia against the United States, or warning about the Taiwan Strait and wider region. On Weibo, Chinese sentiment was summed up by a netizen who remarked: “Only when the motherland is strong can we live a good life.”
Afterwards, I went to a cinema in Singapore’s Bugis district and watched the much-discussed war film, Dead to Rights. To my surprise, this intimate story of ordinary people struck me more deeply than the grandeur of the parade.
The film unfolds against the backdrop of the Nanking massacre in 1937, after the fall of the Chinese capital to the Japanese army. Based on true events, it tells of several civilians taking refuge in a photo studio. To survive, they have to help develop a Japanese photographer’s pictures – only to stumble on irrefutable evidence of atrocities, which they risk their lives to smuggle out. The storytelling is restrained: it neither dwells on brutality nor indulges in fiery denunciation.
Over the course of two hours, the theatre shifted from utter silence to muffled sobs. When the credits finally rolled, many, like me, rose slowly with tear-streaked faces.
What welled up in my chest was not only anger, but also a renewed gratitude for peace. Especially at a time when far-right voices are rising around the world: Germany’s far-right AfD surged to second place in this year’s national election, becoming the largest opposition party; Japan’s Sanseito campaigned on “Japanese first” and secured a record number of seats. In this dizzying global lurch to the right, the simple phrase “remember history” may matter more than we imagine.

I had also been deeply shaken like this in 2017, while on a research fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the time, Jeanne Guillemin, a scholar of international politics, had just published Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial. Knowing I was from China, she quietly placed a copy on my desk, hoping I could help the book find more readers.
Her work filled a major gap in US academia. It exposed the realpolitik of the Cold War, revealing why Japanese war crimes were obscured after World War II: in exchange for access to data from human experimentation, the Americans struck a secret deal with Japanese perpetrators, granting them immunity and blocking a thorough tribunal investigation.
Yet, though the book stirred scholarly debate, it never reached the broader public. Guillemin hoped I could write a column in the mainstream press to bring this history to light. But then (as now), US news was dominated by Trump, leaving little space for obscure international historical topics. A deeper reason, as Chinese scholar Dai Jinhua has observed, lies in Western discourse itself.
To Western scholars, the Nanking massacre was just “not technically sophisticated”, she said. “It’s not special, not surprising, not worth writing about, while Auschwitz represents that kind of efficiency, order, modern technology that is truly terrifying. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where a single bomb destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives – that’s worth writing about.”

Her words cut deep, helping me understand Guillemin’s solitude.
Around the same time, I was reading the works of Ken Liu, the Chinese-American author and translator who brought Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem to Western audiences. One story that left a lasting impression was his novella, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.
The premise is startling: a Japanese-American scientist discovers “Bohm-Kirino particles”, which allow people to observe a moment in history. The catch: once observed, the moment vanishes forever. In other words, the witness simultaneously records and erases history.
Liu applied this conceit to the atrocities of Japan’s Unit 731, allowing families of victims to see for themselves the truth of those experiments. The story is heavy, but its sharpest edge lies in the implicit question: in a world filled with denialists, if history can only be witnessed once, how do we preserve the truth?


Liu has admitted the story was painful to write. The idea for it came when he learned of the tragic suicide of Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking. He said Chang had come under pressure for writing about Japan’s wartime atrocities, which are often excluded from Western mainstream discourse.
When he first completed the novella, editors rejected it, fearing it was controversial. It was eventually accepted by a niche publisher. Liu has since made it freely available online, hoping more people will read it.
As someone instinctively wary of ultranationalist rhetoric, I have long resisted slogans evoking collective identity. But at the screening of Dead to Rights, when I saw Sun Yat-sen’s inscription, “The whole world as one community”, crudely defaced by the invaders with “People of a fallen nation”, tears burst forth. In that moment, I felt the truth of Dai Jinhua’s words: “Every discussion of the war pushed me into becoming a nationalist.”
In that same instant, I finally understood the line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that Ken Liu had cited in his first draft: “A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.”


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People visit the set of Dead to Rights, a Chinese film about the 1937 Nanking massacre, in Shanghai Film Park in Shanghai on August 27. Photo: AFP

People gather during an election campaign for Japan’s “Japanese first” opposition party, Sanseito, in Yokohama on July 19. Photo: Kyodo News via AP

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Results of a vote on a Palestine resolution are displayed during a UN General Assembly meeting on December 3 at the UN headquarters in New York. Photo: AFP


During a special session of the UN General Assembly in New York on March 2, 2022, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s permanent representative to the UN then, holds up a copy of the UN Charter as he speaks. Photo: AFP

Pope Leo receives Philemon Yang, the current UN General Assembly president, in Vatican City on August 11. Photo: EPA / Vatican Media

China’s wartime message can sit alongside a love of today’s Japan

People visit the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on July 2. Photo: Xinhua

A boy looks at a poster of “Dead to Rights”, a film about the Nanking massacre, at a cinema in Beijing on August 4. Photo: Xinhua

The 11th national memorial ceremony is held at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on December 13, 2024. Photo: Xinhua

Opinion

China Opinion

World Opinion

News

China

Japan’s wartime atrocities were covered up by the US, and have been disregarded by Western scholars. This cuts deep


Japan’s wartime atrocities were covered up by the US, and have been disregarded by Western scholars. This cuts deep.


United States

War and conflict

Japan

Unit 731

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Remembering the Chinese war pain deemed unworthy in the West

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Japan’s wartime atrocities were covered up by the US, and have been disregarded by Western scholars. This cuts deep

Japan’s wartime atrocities were covered up by the US, and have been disregarded by Western scholars. This cuts deep