Chapter 33: The Inescapable Purge of Comrade Mei, Judgment at Tokyo

Chapter 33 The Inescapable Purge of Comrade Mei

While Mei Ruao sat in the Tokyo courtroom in November 1948 listening to the reading of the judgment he had labored to make, Chinese Communist forces were closing in on the capital of Nanjing. Terrified at the advance, some people in the city fled, while others turned to looting and mob violence. Americans and other foreigners were evacuating. The police were losing control of the situation or deserting.[1]

The U.S. ambassador in Nanjing secretly warned that the “early fall [of] present Nationalist Government is inevitable.” When Mao Zedong’s revolutionaries seized power, he wrote, “We shall have to make the best of a bad situation and save what we can from the wreckage.”[2] Though Chiang Kai-shek had vowed to fight to his dying breath, the U.S. ambassador warned—in a cable passed directly to Harry Truman—that the bulk of the Chinese people and virtually all government officials were resigned to a Communist victory. The ambassador urged an orderly transfer of power, fearing a hasty flight of Chiang and his entourage into exile.[3]

A few days later, while Sir William Webb was still reading the Tokyo judgment aloud, Chiang sent a frantic appeal to Truman for more military aid and for American military advisers—unaware that U.S. officials in China had already concluded that the situation was so dire that there were no military steps with which Chiang could salvage it. “The Communist forces in Central China are now within striking distance of Shanghai and Nanking,” wrote the falling Chinese potentate. “If we fail to stem the tide, China may be lost to the cause of democracy.”[4]

The same day that General Douglas MacArthur confirmed the Tokyo sentences, the director of the newly established CIA informed Truman that Communist forces could wipe out the remaining Nationalist pockets of resistance, which would “effectively destroy the Nationalist military machine and open the door to Nanking.” The only question was whether it would take weeks or months.[5] The Truman administration grew noticeably frosty to the frantic entreaties from Chiang and his inner circle for military assistance and political support.[6]

Chinese Nationalist officials turned to talking about fighting on from Taiwan.[7]

Mei grieved for his country’s ordeal. Throughout the Tokyo trial, he had been embarrassed by newspaper headlines about Chinese poverty, turmoil, and civil war. “For someone situated abroad,” he once wrote in his diary, “it felt especially painful to see your own nation disappointing.”[8]

After the trial, Chiang’s crumbling government offered Mei a lofty position as justice minister. He faced the most agonizing political decision of his life. Should he follow his Nationalist patrons into exile on Taiwan, or return to the mainland and throw in his lot with the Communists?

Since most of his diaries were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution—a fact which in itself indicates both what he chose and how it went—it is difficult to say how he decided.[9] Of course, his extended family was on the mainland and a life in Taiwan would be unfamiliar. The judge, says his son Mei Xiaoao, had a Confucian sense of responsibility to his parents, and would have been uncomfortable leaving them behind to go to Taiwan. Furthermore, Chiang’s dictatorial government was embarking on four decades of martial law. Most notoriously, starting in February 1947, mainland Nationalist troops crushed a Taiwanese uprising, with at least eighteen thousand people killed. Many progressive Chinese were disgusted by the subsequent “white terror” unleashed against the regime’s domestic critics beginning in 1949, with more than a thousand people executed and tens of thousands arrested before that repressive era at last came to an end by 1992.[10] As Mei’s daughter Mei Xiaokan says, “I heard he didn’t want to board a sinking ship. He was disappointed about the corrupt KMT [Nationalist] government.”

Like many intellectuals at the time, he was drawn by the Communists’ claims to work for the poor and build a more fair and democratic society.[11] “At that time, the Communists were quite a new hope for people,” says his daughter. “I guess he believed they would make China a better country.” His son says, “He has hope in the Chinese Communist Party’s governance.”

Mei chose the new revolution. Evading the Nationalists, he instead went to Hong Kong in June 1949, where he was reunited with his wife. There he was contacted by the Communist Party’s representative in Hong Kong, the leading diplomat and future foreign minister Qiao Guanhua, asking him to work for them. He held press conferences expressing his admiration for the Communist Party. In December, soon after Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, he sailed north for Beijing.

On his arrival, he attended a ceremony where he was publicly praised by no less than Zhou Enlai, the premier and foreign minister. “We know that he worked at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for nearly three years and issued serious and righteous sentences to major criminals who invaded our country,” said Zhou. “He did a great thing for the people and added glory to our nation. People of the entire country should thank him.”

At first, Mei was treated well enough. He was appointed as a Foreign Ministry adviser and later became a member of the People’s Congress. He moved his family into a courtyard home where he could sing Beijing opera, draw cartoons on the frosted windows, buy toy swords for his son, and teach his daughter to sing children’s folk songs from his rural hometown. Under Zhou, one of the founding revolutionaries of the People’s Republic, the Foreign Ministry was somewhat insulated from the radical changes sweeping the government and society.[12] Mei’s well-educated colleagues were pleasant; old specialists could still research problems of international law or world politics, which suited his academic leanings. He worked on a manuscript about the Tokyo trial.[13]

Mei reinvented himself as a loyal Communist. Forsaking his hard-won formal Chinese and elegant English, he trained himself to produce the stock jargon of Maoist propaganda, as required of any successful cadre. His political views, as revealed in his diary, were revised.

He had long adored the United States. Yet just two years after leaving Tokyo, he wrote a blistering article: “Because of the American imperialists’ single-handed domination over Japan and their ambition to rule the world, not only did a free and democratic new Japan fail to emerge, but the old Japan characterized by fascist rule of terror is coming back at an accelerating pace.” Although Mei had actually believed that the American promotion of democratization was too generous, he now dismissed it as merely cosmetic. American imperialists and monopoly capitalists, he wrote, were rebuilding Japan as their colony in order to attack Asia. Mei, who had been awestruck by MacArthur in the flesh, now condemned him (a “white emperor”) for brutalizing the Japanese Communist Party, promoting reactionary rule, and empowering the zaibatsu. Only on one point did his true opinions emerge: criticizing MacArthur for releasing and paroling Japanese war criminals.[14] He endorsed a Soviet proposal to put the emperor on trial for Japanese biowarfare: “Only the American imperialists are trying to defend Hirohito and other war criminals.”[15]

During the Korean War, with Chinese and American troops in pitched combat, Mei implausibly accused the Americans of sending warplanes to spread germ warfare against northeastern China—playing his part in an almost certainly false propaganda campaign by North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union.[16] In 1952, Mao’s regime used his credentials from the Tokyo trial to condemn the Americans as genocidal war criminals worse than Imperial Japan. In an open letter to his fellow Tokyo judges, Mei wrote, “The severity of this crime is worse than that of any atrocity we heard at Nuremberg and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East!” After conducting an ersatz official investigation, he offered to be a witness if there was ever an international tribunal for the American war criminals. Invoking the Nanjing massacre and the Bataan death march, he declared that “the evilness of the American invaders’ germ warfare against peaceful Chinese people exceeds that of the Japanese war criminals’ atrocities.”[17]

Despite such efforts, Mei simply did not fit in Mao’s new regime.[18] After all, he was a bourgeois, English-speaking, American-educated lawyer who had worked for the Nationalists. He was expected to renounce his worldview, report on the evolution of his political thinking, join in a never-ending series of political movements, and learn Russian. He grew nervous and frustrated.

He had a first brush with peril during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. Like countless others, he made the mistake of taking Mao at his word when he welcomed the “blooming of a hundred flowers,” a risky invitation to criticize the regime. The Party later said it had managed to “lure the snake out of its hole.” Afterward, more than half a million people—including intellectuals, artists, and writers—were suddenly branded as rightists and sent off to work in the countryside or a labor camp. Many of them were, like Mei, solid supporters of the Chinese Communist Party.[19]

His criticisms were mild enough. At a seminar of senior experts at the Foreign Ministry, Mei decorously said that the Communist Party’s leadership was unquestionable and its achievements were apparent. Yet he suggested that the Party should give real power to the People’s Congress. Soon before the Soviet Union fell out of favor, he said, “Revering the Soviet Union as deities and regarding the words of Soviet experts as golden rules are acts of dogmatism and xenomania.”[20]

For that, he was branded as a rightist. He got off lightly compared to many others: the attacks on him stayed mostly inside the government, and his name did not appear on the terrifying blacklists of supposed reactionaries published in the state press. His salary and benefits were cut but he managed to keep his job. As Mei’s children later wrote, he was “treated unfairly” in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, yet he remained as patriotic as ever, conscientiously and diligently reflecting upon himself.[21]

“You Cannot Apologize Every Day, Can You?”

Mei’s harsh opinions about Japanese war crimes proved to be a distinct political liability in the People’s Republic.

The Communist Party held itself up as the only leader of the war against the Japanese, accusing the Nationalists of cowardice, humiliating defeat, or treasonous collaboration with the invaders. Communist propagandists had paid little attention to the Tokyo trial, a Nationalist initiative, while it was ongoing.[22] Although the Communists accused the Nationalists of neglecting the punishment of Japanese evildoers, they were more interested in besmirching Chiang and his retinue than in pursuing anything so bourgeois as war crimes trials.[23] Mei, as a functionary in the Nationalist war effort, had been disdainfully described by the People’s Daily as “Judge Mei Ruao, whom bandit Chiang sent to Tokyo to attend the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.”[24]

Then in the early Cold War, the issue of Japanese war criminals became a way of excoriating the Americans. “It is American imperialists, not Japan, who helped Chiang Kai-shek fight the civil war,” explained Mao. “Consequently, the target of our hatred has moved away from Japan and onto American imperialism.”[25] Zhou Enlai accused the United States of reviving Japanese militarism and coddling the war criminals, while Japan’s conservative rulers were denounced as running dogs of American imperialism. When MacArthur allowed an early release of some Japanese war criminals, Zhou reprimanded him for violating “the solemn and just decisions of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to punish Japanese war criminals.”[26] Emperor Hirohito, who had made himself so useful to the United States, was reviled as a leading war criminal, with a renewed push in 1950 to charge him for germ warfare.[27] Early in the Korean War, Zhou complained that the American occupiers had released many important war criminals, seeking to “completely make Japan an American colony and use Japan as America’s tool to invade Asian nations.”[28]

Yet China’s official attitude toward Japan softened dramatically as it sought to lure it away from the United States, pursuing a normalization of relations that would be achieved in 1972. The Japanese were portrayed as fellow victims of Western imperialism.[29] “The Chinese people no longer resent Japan as much as before and, instead, have adopted a friendly attitude,” Mao told Burma’s president in 1954.[30] Zhou emphasized two thousand years of friendship between China and Japan, interrupted briefly by a regrettable conflict which was now over.[31] “We are your friends,” Mao told visiting Japanese legislators in 1955. “You clearly see the Chinese people treat you not as enemies but as friends…. [W]e must think of every means possible to make America withdraw its hands.” He added an astonishingly conciliatory statement that no Chinese Communist cadre could say today: “You have apologized. You cannot apologize every day, can you? It is not good for a nation to sulk.”[32]

Since the issue of repatriating some remaining Japanese war criminals got in the way of normalization, China adopted a decidedly lenient treatment of them.[33] “This issue could be resolved as quickly as possible after the normalization of diplomatic relations,” Mao candidly told those Japanese politicians. “The reason is very simple: we do not need to keep these war criminals. What benefits can come out of keeping these war criminals?”[34] Not long after, in April 1956, the Chinese authorities decided on a generous policy toward just over a thousand Japanese soldiers they held as war criminals. Almost all of them were immediately released without prosecution and sent home to Japan; they were low-ranking, their crimes were seen as relatively light, and they were said to be contrite. In Shenyang and Taiyuan, a special military tribunal put forty-five more senior accused war criminals on trial, most notably a lieutenant general and the former head of a ministry in Manchukuo. They got sentences ranging from eight to twenty years; except for one who died in detention, they were all released, some ahead of schedule, by March 1964.

The Chinese Communist Party publicly crowed that the Japanese war criminals under their control had been reeducated, repenting and becoming friends of the new China. This emphasis on indoctrination rather than punishment was meant to cure a downtrodden, colonized China of its “distorted servile attitude to foreign things and the sense of national inferiority,” as a Communist Party history put it.[35]

In private, Zhou drove to resolve the issue of war criminals quickly in order to achieve normalization, even when that meant defying Chinese public opinion. He reminded a group of Japanese visitors of just how far the Communists were going in freeing all those Japanese soldiers: “All of them have committed serious crimes. It will be difficult to explain to the Chinese people if none of the Japanese war criminals receives a sentence.”[36] He once angrily reminded a visiting Japanese Socialist politician, “It was Japan that waged the war of aggression, it was the Japanese who invaded the Chinese, and a lot more Chinese people died than Japanese people did.” But then he reassuringly added, “In general, we let bygones be bygones.”[37]

Even Henry Puyi, the notorious Qing emperor of Manchukuo who had testified at the Tokyo trial, was released on amnesty in December 1959. In a subsequent meeting with Puyi, Zhou assured him, “We feel no hatred against the Japanese people at all, and the Japanese people were also a victim to militarism.”[38] By the early 1960s, Mao went so far as to see the bright side of Japan’s invasion. He told a visiting Japanese legislator, “Precisely because the Japanese imperial army occupied over half of China, the Chinese people had no other choice but to wake up, pick up their weapons, and establish many anti-Japanese bases, thereby creating the conditions for victory in the War of Liberation. Therefore Japanese warlords and monopolistic capital did a good thing. If I need to say thanks, I would rather thank Japanese warlords.”[39]

In this period the Chinese Communist Party insisted that it was only a small clique of wicked Japanese imperialists who had caused the war, casting the Japanese masses as hoodwinked, innocent victims. To avoid whipping up national hatred of the Japanese, Chinese textbooks and movies avoided depictions of Imperial Japan’s wartime atrocities. When a group of historians in Nanjing researched the massacre there, they were unable to publish their work until 1979, and even then only as an internal publication. Ironically, much of Mao’s approach to war guilt lined up with that of Japanese conservatives: fixing all the blame on a few bad apples, downplaying the Nanjing massacre, looking to the future.[40]

In 1962, Mei dared to challenge that party line. He had become frustrated by Japanese publications about the atomic bombs, praising the Japanese scholarship but arguing that more people had died at Nanjing than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Criticizing other Chinese historians for misinterpretation, he enterprisingly managed to get a bold article published in a government journal, in which he excoriated Japanese leaders and troops for the Nanjing massacre. At a time when the Chinese Communist Party was downplaying the realities of Japan’s wartime record, Mei harshly wrote, “The Nanjing Massacre was no doubt the most striking atrocity committed by Japanese troops during the Second World War, its cruelty being comparable to the Holocaust at Auschwitz, although different from the latter in nature and in its means.” Demonstrating a noticeable ignorance about the Holocaust, he suggested that Nanjing was actually worse than Auschwitz: instead of being quickly gassed, he wrote, the Chinese victims were first insulted, robbed, beaten, mutilated, tortured, or raped before being killed.

Mei extolled the Tokyo trial, praising the reliability of its evidence, particularly about mass rape, and lauding its judgment for showing that “the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese troops in Nanking were indeed unprecedented in the history of modern war.” Although the judgment had reckoned that the death toll there was about two hundred thousand, he called that a “prudent and conservative” estimate and argued that the total was most likely around three hundred and fifty thousand. He scorched General Matsui Iwane as the leading criminal of Nanjing: “His sentence to death by hanging was a demonstration of justice and a form of small solace for the Chinese people, although it does not make us forget this unprecedented tragedy in Chinese history.”

In some ways Mei toed the official line: blaming the cowardice and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek and his troops for the fall of Nanjing. Yet his article directly challenged Maoist orthodoxies. He urged laggard historians to interview survivors before it was too late. “I am not a revanchist,” he wrote defensively. “Neither do I intend to ascribe the debt of blood owed to us by the Japanese imperialists to the Japanese people. I believe, however, that to forget the suffering of the past is to be vulnerable to tragedy in the future.”[41]

This article was a disaster for Mei. A year later, Zhou Enlai told a Japanese former prime minister that the Chinese government was overcoming “a small group of people who find the discussion of friendship with Japan unacceptable because of Japan’s long aggression against China.”[42] Mei was accused of stirring up national hatred and revenge against the Japanese. Some Communist critics even said that his discussion of a humiliating Chinese defeat implied a hidden admiration for the prowess of Japanese troops.[43]

“I Am Only a Tattered and Out-of-Date Dictionary”

Mei’s timing was terrible: his combative article came out only a few years before the start of the Cultural Revolution.

In 1966, an elderly Mao unleashed what he called a “great revolution that touched people’s souls.” Fearing that the revolution had lost its way, worried that the Soviet Union had gone soft, he meant to transform the Chinese into “Communist new men” liberated from their feudal selfishness. The Cultural Revolution would build a totalitarian society, relying on an all-powerful ruler with no rule of law.[44] The result was a mass political campaign to get rid of the power of bureaucracy, intellectuals, and professionals. With radical Communist Party cadres and fanatical young Red Guards suddenly allowed to attack upward, the party-state essentially collapsed. The youth were encouraged to attack their parents and teachers, to force their elders to do groveling self-criticism, to trash religious and historical sites, to burn books and antiques, and to destroy “the four olds”: old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits. China plunged into a bloody decade of chaos and street violence.[45]

This utopia left little room for bookish lawyers with fond memories of student days at Stanford and Chicago. Early in the Cultural Revolution, Mei was denounced as a “reactionary academic authority”—a term for intellectuals or scholars vilified by the radicals.[46] The Foreign Ministry was no longer protected. “The Red Guards came to our home,” says his daughter Mei Xiaokan. “They searched everything to see if we had any anti-revolutionary things.” Fortunately these Red Guards were not so furious, not the ones inclined to whip people with their belts. Even so, Mei found himself accused of such iniquities as “being a reactionary who glorifies the Americans and the Japanese,” “vainly hoping to recover his former authority,” and “opposing Sino-Japanese friendship.” Because he had warned in his article about the Nanjing massacre not to forget past suffering, he was denounced for “slandering the party as being forgetful.”

Trying to defend himself, he claimed—demonstrably falsely—that he had no special skills or knowledge, no decent pieces of published work. He said that “over the years I’ve been the most enthusiastic person in revealing America and Japan’s collusion to revive militarism.” He reminded his youthful accusers that the Nationalists saw him as a wanted criminal: “If I really regained my authority, I would probably get executed before all of you young comrades!” He knew that his scholarly achievements were irrelevant to the killing and upheaval all around him: “In reality I am only a tattered and out-of-date dictionary.”

None of this saved him. While he was apparently not physically beaten, he was forced to perform self-criticism, endlessly denouncing his own reactionary and bourgeois tendencies and promising to remake himself as a better Communist. Compared to countless others with a Nationalist past, he could have faced a harsher fate, but that was cold comfort. Instead of writing his book on the Tokyo trial, he had to compose investigative reports about other people who had also fallen afoul of the revolution. The materials he had assembled for his book about the Tokyo trial—journals, notes, cards, newspaper clippings—were confiscated and never found again; the book was never finished.[47] He was put to forced labor, meant both to make him understand the working classes and to humiliate him: a Stanford-educated lawyer cleaning offices and scrubbing toilets.

Mei despaired. He was rocked by terrible news of old colleagues being killed and old friends committing suicide. He grew profoundly sad. He smoked too much: it was the one thing he liked that he could still do. At one point, he wrote to the government asking them to investigate and punish arson at a British government office, which could only have made things worse for him. “We had seen so many people being beaten to death,” says Mei Xiaokan. “Some people in our neighborhood killed themselves. We had people jumping from their apartments.”

Under the cumulative strain, suffering from hypertension and heart disease, his health deteriorated. He was too sick to write. On April 23, 1973, he died at the age of sixty-nine.[48]

Afterlife

After Mao died and the Cultural Revolution came to an end, Mei Ruao was forgotten, written out of Chinese history.

Like many of his generation, his reputation was rehabilitated in the reform era under Deng Xiaoping. The new ruler launched an initiative to improve relations with Japan, opening a brief honeymoon between the two countries. In October 1978, he became the first Chinese leader to visit Japan after more than two thousand years of contact. As they signed a treaty of peace and friendship, he impulsively hugged the startled Japanese prime minister. He had a two-hour lunch with Hirohito at the Imperial Palace. Although no records were kept, Deng said that bygones should be bygones, and the emperor referred to the “unfortunate happening,” which the Chinese side chose to take as an indirect apology.[49]

Under Deng as paramount leader, Chinese elites went through a searing introspection about what had gone wrong during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. That repudiation of the Cultural Revolution made it possible to revive Mei’s reputation. After being officially labeled a rightist for some two decades, in 1979 Foreign Ministry officials found his family and showed them documents saying that he had been cleared. “I think it’s fair,” says his son Mei Xiaoao. “It shows that the Chinese government had admitted the mistake made in the Cultural Revolution.”

In 1985, Mei was reintroduced to the Chinese public in a long three-part magazine profile, heralding his restored status as a luminary of the People’s Republic. This was part of a nationalistic rediscovery of the war against Japan: the same year, a large memorial museum was built in Nanjing for the victims of the massacre there. The magazine profile presented heroic episodes from his adventure in Tokyo that have become famous in China. Although Mei’s labor at the trial actually mostly consisted of writing intricate memoranda and cajoling the other judges, here he leapt out as a man of action: brandishing a ceremonial sword while vowing vengeance on the war criminals, demanding a prime seat next to Webb, insisting that the judgment include a section about Japanese atrocities. According to this version, Mei resolved that if General Matsui Iwane and General Doihara Kenji did not get the death penalty, then he “must commit suicide by jumping into the sea to apologize to the Chinese people…. Mei Ruao was so anxious that his hair turned gray. While his personal dignity and life was a small matter, the debt of blood for millions of fellow Chinese people must be repaid.”

The article treated Mei as every inch a Communist, emphasizing how he had broken with the Nationalists. It duly denied any World War II glory to them: “Chiang Kai-shek’s government had no interest in sending people to collect evidence of the Japanese military’s atrocities; instead, it was fully committed to provoking a civil war and eliminating the Chinese Communist Party.” Yet in keeping with the reform spirit of the Deng era, the magazine rehabilitated the judge for his modest criticism of the Party before the Anti-Rightist Campaign: “From today’s perspective, his words were undoubtedly right. However, he suffered unfair treatment at that point in time.”

The article regretted that for “historical reasons”—meaning the Cultural Revolution—young Chinese knew almost nothing about the Chinese judge who had wielded such power at the Tokyo trial. It celebrated the establishment of a museum to commemorate the Nanjing massacre and efforts to document it. “We would like to use this to let rest in comfort Mei Ruao—the Chinese judge at the Tokyo tribunal.”[50]

Since then, Mei’s legend has grown. His devoted children have tenderly looked after his legacy, getting his works published posthumously. The local government in Nanchang set up a small museum about him. Newspapers publish admiring stories about his achievements at the Tokyo trial, sometimes hinting at his persecution during the Cultural Revolution.[51] His prestigious alma mater, Tsinghua University, named a law school chair after him. “His story is well known today,” says Feng Xiang, the Mei Ruao Professor in Law at Tsinghua, a soft-spoken legal theorist. “People recognize his name.”

Deng’s rapprochement with Japan proved short-lived, in part due to recurrent squabbles over wartime memory. Starting with a heated row about nationalistic Japanese textbooks in 1982, China began the kind of loud protests against Japan that are familiar today.[52] To the benefit of Mei’s reputation, China’s own textbooks and media began to give some credit to the Nationalists for their stubborn fight against the Japanese imperialist aggressors, making Japanese war crimes a central theme. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, the beleaguered Communist Party intensified its memorialization of China’s national humiliation, exemplified by the Nanjing massacre.[53] Starting in 1991, the authorities pushed a campaign of “patriotic education” that vilified the Japanese, as well as Western imperialism, breaking from the Mao-era habit of ducking the subject of the war: too humiliating, too strategically inconvenient, too apt to show the Nationalists as heroes.[54]

The Communists have realized that nurturing popular hatred of Japan can be useful at home, justifying the Party’s iron grip on power. It may sometimes strengthen their bargaining position in international disputes, showing that their own hands are tied or that the ruling Communists are actually easier to deal with than the enraged masses. Yet such indulgence of popular rage must be handled carefully: enough to bolster the Party, but not so much that it gets out of hand.[55] In 2005 and 2013, China’s rulers tried to both ride and manage waves of protests and riots against the Japanese that threatened to spin out of state control.[56]

The tension between China and Japan boils well beyond a standard realpolitik wariness between two rival countries. Since the 1980s, Chinese officials have viewed Japan with a visceral dread and loathing out of all proportion to the actual threat posed by a largely disarmed, peaceful, smaller nation. New generations of postwar Chinese leadership find it hard to believe that Japanese pacifism is genuine, nor that Japan will continue to accept its status as a demilitarized power. Chinese military and civilian analysts have long feared that Japan’s dominant Liberal Democratic Party really means first to become an economic superpower and then become a major military power too.[57]

Chinese television and movies are saturated with stories about China’s heroic war against the bloodthirsty Japanese.[58] In 2006, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, a big-budget Chinese film called The Tokyo Trial was released in major theater chains, telling the story with Mei as the central character. Xinhua, the Chinese official news agency, praised its box office success despite competition from a junky Hollywood superhero movie, X-Men: The Last Stand.[59] The part of Mei was played by a dashing Hong Kong action-movie star, Damian Lau, who usually plays assassins, swordsmen, or cops. “Mei Ruao is a person with a strong sense of ethics and national pride,” said Lau in a story for Chinese state radio. “I tried to master his inner world through these aspects. I really respect him.” Another star in the film, Ken Chu, a Taiwanese actor and member of a boy band, said, “Maybe this movie is not an entertaining film, but it’s a movie that all Chinese should watch because it retells historical facts all Chinese should know.”[60]

Mei’s children are bemused by the action-hero version of their scholarly father. “Before the movie, many people in China didn’t know about the Tokyo tribunal and now they know,” says Mei Xiaoao. “So that’s good. But it has many defects in the details, like how the court actually worked, how those terms of law are being used.” The nationalistic exaltation of Mei has grown so omnipresent that it took considerable courage for a dissident in Sichuan, scornfully reviewing the movie, to criticize him for “a perspective dominated by hatred, bitterness, punishment, and revenge.”[61]

In recent years, as the Chinese Communist Party has embraced a fiercely xenophobic nationalism, Mei has found a new estimation as an anti-Japanese champion, with glowing profiles in official publications.[62] “He is very famous,” says a senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official who voices the party line. “He is regarded as a patriot, an eminent scholar who has upheld historical justice.” To parry right-wing Japanese polemicists, the authorities had Shanghai Jiaotong University set up a major research center to study the Tokyo trial.[63] The Chinese Communist Party, disdainful of the Tokyo trial at the time, now celebrates it as an act of historic justice—thereby rebuking Japan’s conservative governments.[64] The People’s Daily argued that the trial was not Allied victors’ justice but a trial for all human beings.[65] “The Tokyo trial was peaceful, civilized, and righteous,” declared a People’s Liberation Army newspaper.[66]

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has escalated the preoccupation with history, especially a heroic version of World War II, seen as essential to its claim on power. The authorities persistently remind their people of China’s long victimhood while working to conflate the nation with the party, so that criticism of the Communists is treated as an attack on the Chinese people.[67] As a core feature of his reign, the powerful Xi decries “historical nihilism,” a Communist slogan which means allowing enemies to dwell on ugly episodes in history. He warns that the Soviet Communist Party fell in large part because it discredited Soviet history and besmirched Joseph Stalin’s achievements, “creating historical nihilism and confused thinking.” As Xi exhorted in a major speech urging an ideological struggle, “The crucial point of historical nihilism is to fundamentally negate the leading position of Marxism, the inevitability that China would take the socialist path, and the leadership of the CCP.” Therefore Communists must zealously put forward a glorious chronicle of the past that enhances their infallible aura; China has criminalized public criticism of revolutionary history.[68] In November 2021, Xi had the Communist Party’s central committee push through a landmark historical resolution—something previously only done by Mao Zedong in 1945 and Deng Xiaoping in 1981—that celebrated his nationalistic view of history and national security.[69]

The Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, as the war is called in China, is essential to Xi’s fight against historical nihilism. Rather than yielding the spotlight to the Nationalist government for leading the war, let alone discussing the uncomfortable fact that many Chinese collaborated with the Japanese, he has urged cadres and scholars to exalt the Communists’ central role in combating the Japanese invaders.[70] Although Chinese historians and school textbooks used to treat the war as beginning at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937, Xi had them rewind the start date to the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, treating it as a “fourteen-year War of Resistance.”[71] Since taking power, he has established two official days of commemoration for the war: September 3 is Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, marking Japan’s surrender, and December 13 is National Memorial Day, mourning the Nanjing massacre.[72] To celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender in September 2015, he held a massive military parade in Tiananmen Square, featuring tanks and long-range strategic missiles.[73] His remembrances of the war combine themes of Chinese victimhood and Chinese greatness. Victory over Japan, Xi told the parade audience, was the “first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times,” at last putting “an end to the national humiliation of China” inflicted by foreign imperialists.[74]

Xi has made Japanese war crimes a major theme of his rhetoric.[75] In 2014, the paramount leader somberly presided over the national government’s first official day of remembrance of the Nanjing massacre, expanding on previous commemorations by city and local governments. Wearing a white flower on his lapel, he fixed war guilt on a small circle of militarists but acclaimed the verdicts of the Tokyo trial and China’s own military tribunal against “a group of Japanese war criminals whose hands were full of Chinese people’s fresh blood to legal and righteous trials and severe punishments. They are permanently nailed to the historical pillar of shame”—a Chinese expression meaning that the guilt will never be forgotten.[76] In another talk that year, aiming at Abe Shinzo and other rightists, he raged that “some Japanese political organizations and political figures still deny the Japanese military’s barbaric crime of aggression, still stubbornly pay homage to the souls of war criminals whose hands were tainted with fresh blood, still make statements beautifying the war of aggression and colonial dominance, and still challenge the conscience of mankind.”[77]

Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, meets with elderly survivors of the Nanjing massacre after attending an official ceremony marking the eightieth anniversary of the atrocities, Nanjing, December 13, 2017.

During a fiery speech at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 2017—which a well-connected Chinese official says was meant to respond to Abe’s historical provocations—Xi declared, “The Chinese people who have made heavy sacrifices will unyieldingly defend the history written with our blood and lives. The Chinese people and people in all other countries will absolutely not allow anyone to reject, distort, or even beautify the history of aggression.”[78] In an online summit in April 2022, European Union leaders invoked the horrors of World War II as a justification for speaking up for human rights in Ukraine, Xinjiang, and elsewhere; Xi replied with a lecture about European colonialism and bigotry. He emphasized that the Nanjing massacre had left Chinese with a strong feeling about human rights, and about foreigners with double standards too.[79]

Of course, the Chinese Communist Party has brought death to more Chinese than were ever killed by the Japanese invaders. There is no prospect of a real historical accounting within China for Mao’s purges, the untold millions of deaths in the terror-famine of the Great Leap Forward, or the violent convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, nor for more recent enormities such as the internment camps for more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. Yet the Chinese state, eliding its own record, keeps up an incessant drumbeat about history.

Although Chinese leaders regard the United States as the most menacing foreign power, China’s official embrace of the Tokyo trial has unleashed waves of populist hatred against the Japanese. While it is hard to get reliable soundings of Chinese public opinion under authoritarianism, there is little doubt about a deep popular loathing for Japan, with widespread remembrance of war crimes and scant credence given to more recent acts of repentance.[80] After CCTV News posted about the Tokyo trial on Weibo, a leading social media site, one commenter asked, “When will the Japanese people disappear from the earth like dinosaurs?” “The globe is warming up and sea level rising,” replied another netizen. “Japan, the little island, will be underwater soon.”[81] When the Chinese Youth League posted about the Tokyo trial, it got comments ranging from “Trial of justice!” to “All little Japanese should die. Why didn’t the Americans drop more nuclear bombs?”[82]

Such sentiments are easily found in conversations around China. People have learned about the Nanjing massacre from textbooks and watching state television, and some even mention the biowarfare Unit 731. “They have not apologized enough,” says a hipster architect. “The emperor is the mastermind.” Although some younger people have a warm impression of Japan, enjoying its pop culture and envying its freedom, more typical is a thoughtful retired People’s Liberation Army officer with a crew cut who remembers the Nanjing massacre as “a scar.” China’s weakness invited Japanese aggression, he says, adding, “We cannot easily be bullied by other nations now.” In a Beijing hutong, a grizzled middle-aged worker, his face worn and weathered, says, “There should be a giant earthquake that sinks all of Japan.” After his friends laugh with approval, he says, “All Japanese people are bad. They haven’t changed.” Leaning in, he adds, “They are like Jews. They should be eliminated from the earth. There should be an extermination of the Japanese like what the Germans did to the Jews.” Seeing that he has crossed a line, he clarifies that he doesn’t mean that for Jews, only for Japanese.

In an editorial in 2017, the People’s Daily blasted Japanese right-wingers who rejected history, emphasizing “the historical truth of Japan’s aggression against China, as symbolized by the Nanjing massacre.” The state newspaper, which had in 1948 taunted Mei as the instrument of “bandit” Chiang Kai-shek, now treated him with respect and admiration. Like the lavish museum and memorial to the massacre in Nanjing, the newspaper even approvingly quoted the very words that had got him in such trouble during the Cultural Revolution about the need not “to forget the suffering of the past.”[83]