Showing posts with label Iris Chang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iris Chang. Show all posts

Saturday, February 03, 2007

A Woman We Couldn't Forget


Two years after Iris Chang's untimely death, a bust of her was unveiled in a reading room at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Her New York Time bestselling book "Rape of Nanking" was the first major work on the Nanking Massacre in English, which revived people's memory of the darkest days in human history. Even decades later, the two weeks of bloody, unstopped and indiscriminated slaughtering of civilian residents in Nanking has been concealed by both Chinese and Japanese governments for political reasons. A movie "Nanking" made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last month. More movies and TV programs are being made at the dawn of the 70 anniversary when 300,000 Chinese of then capital city Nanking were killed when the city fell to the Japanese invasion in 1937.

Iris Chang died while she was preparing for her fourth book. The topic of the book will be Bataan Death March, while ten thousands of allied POWs, mostly American, were tortured and died on a 100 kilometers prisoner transfer in 1994 after the fell of Philippine to Japanese invasion.

Friday, July 07, 2006

69 Years since 7/7/1937

The national resistance to the Japanese invasion started on July 7, 1937. There were regional clashes and even wars between Japan and Russia on Chinese land, but the central government had been basically siting aside until July 7, 1937 when Chinese army stationed in Lugou (aka Marco Polo) Bridge were attacked by Japanese army.

It was estimated that more than 30 million Chinese lives were lost in the eight years war from 1937 to 1945. After the then capital city Nanjing was taken by Japanese occupation, about 400,000 residents were slaughtered in a few days. American Chinese historian Iris Chang wrote a book 'Rape of Nanking' about this history (Penguin, 1998).