Summary Of The Book 'The Rape Of Nanking' By Iris Chang

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The Rape of Nanking was written by Iris Chang and tells the horrifying story of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and soldiers by the Japanese army during World War II in the winter of 1937. This event is portrayed in three perspectives: through the eyes of the ruthless Japanese military, the terror-stricken Chinese tortured and slaughtered in the once peaceful city of Nanking, and the group of Europeans and Americans who stayed behind to create the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone which saved almost 300,000 lives. The second part of the book discusses the Japanese government's refusal to admit its war crimes against humanity and its effort to hide this mass murder from the public knowledge, and "to …show more content…

She was temporarily employed as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune before receiving a graduate's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her works focuses on the strife and suffering that the Chinese and Chinese-Americans have had to struggle through. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm, was published in 1995 and describes the ironic account of Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, a brilliant scientist who contributed immensely to the American military defense but was labeled a Communist and deported to China, where he developed the Silkworm missile that could be used against the very Americans that held him in contempt during the Red Scare. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Chang's second book, was …show more content…

She had three primary sources: John Rabe, a German businessman; Robert Wilson, an American surgeon; and Wilhelmina Vautrin, an American missionary professor. The granddaughter of John Rabe, Ursula Reinhardt, gave Chang detailed descriptions of Rabe's life and copies of his reports and diaries, which spanned over thousands of pages. Early biological information on Robert Wilson's and Wilhelmina Vautrin's lives came from Marjorie Wilson (his widow) and Emma Lyon (her niece), respectively, during telephone interviews. The Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II, the New China News Agency, the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War, and survivors of the Rape have all contributed to her research in the form of photographs, articles, and important contacts from all over the world. She traveled to the East Coast to visit the Yale Divinity School Library in New Haven, and the archivists showed her missionary diaries and photographs of the massacre. When she traveled to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., an inconceivable amount of information became available to her: military and diplomatic reports, intercepts of Japanese Foreign Office communications, OSS records and transcripts, and exhibits of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). On her trip to Nanking and the Republic of China, she received Chinese documentation of the Rape of

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