Nanking Atrocity Analysis

The Nanking Atrocity is a contentious historical event in world history. The two countries in which it involved, China and Japan, both argue vehemently about what events actually occurred and those that have been fabricated. In August of 1937 the Japanese army began their invasion of China’s capital, Shanghai. By mid-November they had conquered the city and they began their march towards the city of Nanking, the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. This city, however, would not be able to resist the Japanese army and would also fall shortly after Shanghai. After numerous air raids on the city, Japanese troops invaded the walls of Nanking on December 13th and established military control over the city. In the subsequent weeks, horrendous
Politically, collaboration can be used to describe; political cooperation with an occupying power, adaption of the occupied society to new conditions, or the “continuing exercise of power under pressure produced by the presence of an occupying power.” In the first, politicians of the occupied state conform to and enforce orders for the occupier. In the second, the society adapts to the rule of the occupier, accepting any and all new rules set into motion. In the third, people living in the occupied state exercise their own power as individuals to collaborate with the occupying state. The third is how a large quantity of the collaboration between the Japanese and Chinese occurred during the Japanese occupation of
The society used the swastika because of its significance in Chinese Buddhism, it is recognized as universal symbol of peace. The Red Swastika Society had two branches that operated within Nanking, one directly in the city and one in Nanking’s river port Hsiakwan, one of the city’s poorest areas. The organization's main duties were to provide aid to those living in destitute conditions. The Red Swastika Society provided food, clothing, medicines, and shelter for civilians in Nanking. Besides organizing aide in the city, a huge job for the RSS was the burial of abandoned corpses on the streets. They kept documents on how many bodies they had recovered, buried, and how those people died. Burial workers turned in daily records of the dead they buried to bring about a total of 43,121 bodies buried by the Society by the end of the Japanese occupation. The local prestige of the society made it an organization that the Japanese were willing to work with in order to maintain some form of peace within the