CHINA:A movie on 1937 Japanese atrocities in China could revive old tensions,writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
A US-made documentary, Nanking, which shows eyewitness accounts of atrocities by Japanese troops during the 1937 "Rape of Nanking", was premiered in Beijing this week, yet again bringing strained ties between China and Japan into sharp focus.
The Japanese ground assault on the then-capital of China began on December 10th and the city fell on December 13th, the signal for the start of the six-week-long incident known as the "Rape of Nanking", in which the Chinese say 300,000 people were killed, although the 1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunal found Japanese troops killed around half this number.
The incident remains a huge stumbling block in relations between China and Japan even today. The Chinese feel the Japanese have failed to atone properly for wartime atrocities.
Meanwhile, a group of 100 Japanese parliamentarians has drawn criticism from China for saying last month that documents from their government's archives indicated only about 20,000 were killed.
"The crime and hatred of Japanese militarism left a deep scar on the Chinese people . . . and the memory will never fade away," said Gao Feng, president of CCDS, one of the film's co-distributors in China, before a screening in western Beijing.
Chinese captives were tortured, burned and buried alive, decapitated, bayoneted and shot en masse; and between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women and girls of all ages were raped, many murdered or forced into sex slavery.
The 90-minute film, co-directed by Oscar-winner Bill Guttentag and producer Dan Sturman, opened in Beijing this week and goes on general release in more than 100 cinemas from Saturday, July 7th, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Japan's full-scale invasion of China.
The documentary, which looks set to be the first of a wave of new movies this year about the incident, mixes archive footage and readings by actors such as Woody Harrelson, Stephen Dorff, Jürgen Prochnow and Mariel Hemingway about a group of foreigners who protected Chinese residents in Nanking from Japanese invaders.
Given that Chinese state broadcaster CCTV is one of the co-producers, local audiences are likely to find the film sympathetic to the Chinese view of the massacre.
The production team insists it received script approval but no interference with editorial content from the Chinese government.
Nankingwas produced by Ted Leonsis, formerly vice-chairman of the technology firm AOL, who said he was moved to make the picture by Iris Chang's powerful book about the Nanjing massacre, called The Rape of Nanking.
He urged Chinese people to see it "by any means necessary. Free on the internet, even on pirated disc".
The film uses 500 hours of footage and interviews with survivors and includes images of bomb-shattered streets, bodies of children piled high and gruesome testimonies of rape and murder by Chinese victims. It also includes confessions by Japanese soldiers.
The documentary also features film footage shot by John Gillespie Magee, an Episcopal pastor in Nanjing from 1912 to 1940, who recorded the massacre and rescued many Chinese people. His footage was used in the Allied tribunal after the war as one of the primary sources to document the atrocities.
He co-operated with the "Good German of Nanking", John Rabe, a card-carrying Nazi Party member and Siemens engineer in setting up a Red Cross exclusion zone that protected tens of thousands of residents from the Japanese onslaught.
The war against Japan remains a hugely political issue in China and, generally, the Chinese government is keen that any films about Nanking's past serve nationalist interests, while at the same time doing nothing to irk Japan, on whose trade it is very reliant.
Among other forthcoming projects is Nanking Xmas 1937by the Hong Kong director Yim Ho, a big-budget film that also focuses on the efforts of foreigners to shelter Chinese from the Japanese but appears to be having difficulties with script approval.
Another Hong Kong director Stanley Tong, best known for his work on action movies with Jackie Chan, is working on The Diary, which is expected to be released before the anniversary of the project and has passed the censors.
Acclaimed director Lu Chuan's Nanking! Nanking!has state film company backing but still has to go through five months of wrangling to get the script past the censors.
A €50 million project by producer Gerald Green was loudly trumpeted last year at a huge launch but little has been heard about the joint production with the Jiangsu state government since then.