Top-secret Chinese Nationalist Documents Reveal the Truth about the Nanking Incident

Summary

TOP-SECRET CHINESE NATIONALIST DOCUMENTS REVEAL THE TRUTH ABOUT
THE NANKING INCIDENT
(Summary)
Higashinakano Shudo
Professor of Intellectual History
Asia University, Tokyo
In January 2003, official documents that demolish — once and for all — the “Nanking
Massacre” myth were discovered. Marked “top-secret,” they were compiled in 1941 by the
Chinese Nationalist Ministry of Information under the title Outline of International Propaganda
Operations. The documents are detailed records describing counterintelligence activities
implemented by the Nationalists in 1937, when war with Japan broke out, and thereafter.
Nanking was the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in 1937. The documents are
preserved in Taiwan, home to the Nationalists since 1949. The author discovered them at the
Museum of Chinese Nationalist Party History in Taipei. He made photocopies of the documents,
which he took back to Japan.
An examination of those documents reveals that the provenance of accusations that Japan
perpetrated a massacre in Nanking is wartime propaganda initiated by the Nationalist intelligence
organization. They also expose European and American Nationalist agents who were intimately
involved in the concoction of “Nanking Massacre” propaganda.
One of them was the China correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, an Australian who went
by the name of H. J. Timperley. At the time, Timperley was perceived as the conscientious
journalist who told the world about the “Nanking Massacre.” What War Means: The Japanese
Terror in China, a book that he edited, became the bible of proponents of the massacre. However,
the top-secret documents unearthed in 2003 state, in no uncertain terms, that What War Means
was part of the Chinese propaganda campaign against Japan.
In 1937, the Nationalist government’s International Propaganda Department made the decision to
mount an external propaganda campaign involving foreign (European and American)
collaborators. The use of foreign newspaper reporters as those collaborators was central to that
campaign.
The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was organized mainly by Christian
missionaries from the U.S.; its members were all foreigners residing in Nanking. We now know
that the Committee’s leaders were closely connected with Timperley, and participated willingly
in the propaganda campaign against Japan. War Damage in the Nanking Area, written by Lewis
Smythe and M. S. Bates, was also a Chinese Nationalist propaganda tool designed for use against
Japan.
Equally important, perhaps, is absence of any mention of a massacre’s having been perpetrated in
Nanking in official Nationalist government proclamations issued between 1937 and 1945. In the
aforementioned top-secret documents, no particular emphasis is given to Nanking in the year
1937, except for references to the launching of a propaganda war against Japan in connection
with the fall of the Nationalist capital.
According to these same documents, between December 1937 (the time when the massacre is
supposed to have been committed) and October 1938, the Nationalist government, now operating
from Hankou, held a total of 300 press conferences to which members of the foreign press were
invited (usually 50 of those journalists attended). However, there is no evidence showing that
mention of a massacre in Nanking was made at any of those conferences. The government did
issue a protest to the Assembly of the League of Nations soon after the Nanking Incident (the fall
of Nanking). However, that protest was in connection with a minor bombing incident in Hankou.
Even more interesting are the circumstances surrounding the Chinese translation of What War
Means: The Japanese Terror in China, the aforementioned propaganda book issued by the
International Propaganda Department. Outline of International Propaganda Operations tells us
that portions of the book suggesting that there had been a massacre in Nanking were deleted from
that translation. The International Propaganda Department had apparently deemed those sections
inappropriate because they lacked credibility and might be counterproductive. This decision
implies that the Nationalist propaganda machine had determined that the dissemination of
propaganda — even in wartime — relating to a massacre in Nanking was unseemly.
Proponents of the “Nanking Massacre” have been mystified for decades by the absence of
references to a massacre in the writings of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, and in reports and
other documents relating to the Battle of Nanking issued by the Nationalist government. Outline
of International Propaganda Operations has solved the mystery, once and for all.