Iris Chang's Criticism Of 'The Rape Of Nanking'

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In pursuit of a tangible, reliable form of history, historians become entangled in a labyrinth of theoretical dichotomies and complex controversies; the bane of history, which sabotages genuine inquiry and allows for holocaust denial. For instance, the supposed Nanking Massacre of December 1937 to January 1938, a six-week carnage of Chinese soldiers and civilians by Japanese soldiers, produces a broad historical debate, revolving around the truth of what happened. This debate began with Iris Chang, a Chinese- American journalist who wrote the best- selling account of “The Rape of Nanking” in 1997. Her non-fiction prose drew international eyes and provoked numerous responses from fellow historians. Western Historians generally agreed that the atrocity had been too long a mere ‘incident’ in the historiography of World War II and deserved more concern. There were those, however, that criticized Chang on her inaccurate methodologies and the incorporation of personal bias. Particularly, multiple Japanese scholars produced astonishingly negative responses, looking at Chang’s work, and the Nanking Massacre with a revisionist view, denying that the event occurred at all. Several authors and historians wrote in direct response to Iris Chang’s work. Most notable, perhaps, is Masaaki Tanaka’s work, …show more content…

For instance, the fact that there exist no official Chinese communist records of the event at the time is ostensibly a result of the chaos at the time, as the Chinese communists were functioning largely underground in the Nanking region, and did not rise to power until the 1950’s; it is irrational to expect there to be any record of an event 13 years prior. The other points Tanaka makes may have some merit, but fail to grasp the larger argument at hand; his arguments of technicalities infuse his work with a sense of