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1 April 1998 CONTACT: Stew Salowitz, 309-556-3206
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Historian/Author Iris Chang to Speak at Illinois Wesleyan
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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- Iris Chang will present a program on the "Forgotten
Holocaust" of World War II when she visits the Illinois Wesleyan University
campus on Thursday, April 9.
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Chang, the author of the 1997 book "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten
Holocaust of World War II," will speak at 7:30 p.m. in room C-101 of the
Center for Natural Science, 201 E. Beecher St. Chang's appearance, which
is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the IWU Division of Social
Science, Department of History, Women's Studies Program, and International
Studies Program-Asian Studies Team.
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A Champaign native, Chang is a graduate of the University of Illinois and
Johns Hopkins University. As a freelance writer her work has appeared in
the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Associated Press. Chang's first
book was "Thread of the Silkworm" (1995), about Tsien Hsue-Shen, a Chinese
immigrant who, forced out of the United States, pioneered the Chinese missile
program.
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Although she was born halfway around the world and two generations removed
from the incident at Nanking, it is almost as if Chang, who now lives in
Sunnyvale, Calif., has lived through it herself. She is one of few Americans
who has interviewed Chinese survivors of the Asian Holocaust in China with
permission of the government.
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On the morning of Dec. 13, 1937, roughly 50,000 Japanese soldiers captured
Nanking, China's capital city. Many residents, including Chang's grandparents,
had already fled Nanking before the invasion yet, according to historians,
more than half a million Chinese remained trapped in Nanking. On that invasion,
the Japanese there were given the order to kill all captives and during
the ensuing chaos, between 200,000 and 300,000 or more Chinese lost their
lives, according to court records and historians.
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According to stories recorded in international newspapers, Chinese government
and academic documents, Japanese photographs and in the diaries of Red
Cross officials stationed in Nanking, the Japanese killed so many men,
women and children with machetes that their arms became tired and they
had to rest before they continued. The soldiers also used bayonets, machine
guns, live burial and fire. Decapitation was popular and Chinese heads
were fed to the dogs. Women were raped, forced to perform bizarre sexual
acts, then killed. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons,
their mothers. Chinese men were forced to rape corpses. Competitions took
place among Japanese soldiers to see how many Chinese they could kill in
one day. These horrors continued for six to eight weeks.
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After World War II, the U.S. brokered secret deals with the Japanese government,
according to Chang, and in exchange for their research on germ warfare
and human biology, the actions of the Japanese in China and elsewhere in
the Pacific would be ignored. Unlike the outrage over the actions of the
Nazis, Chang says there has been little international recognition of Japanese
war crimes. Only in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war,
did the Diet house of the Japanese parliament pass a resolution expressing
"deep remorse" over Japan's World War II actions, noting simultaneously
that such actions took place in the context of worldwide "colonial rules
and acts of aggression." Soon after, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama
made a "personal" statement" expressing his remorse, in which he called
Japanese actions a "mistake" which would not be repeated.
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China, with its own post-World War II internal war, has done little of
note to hold the Japanese responsible for its military actions and only
in the last decade, since the communist Chinese government's killing of
students in Tiananmen Square inspired massive protests, have American-based
Chinese begun to protest publicly in their adopted nation.
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"In the past, the Chinese learned from their ancestors and parents that
politics can be deadly," Chang suggests. "People came to this country because
of their scientific or technical expertise, and they had learned from their
parents or from their own experiences that it's probably best to stay away
from politics. That's why you see a tradition of Chinese political apathy
in this country. But in the last few years we've seen an increase in Chinese
activism."
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Chang became interested in the atrocities at Nanking when her parents told
her stories as a little girl. "I found it hard to believe at that time,"
Chang says, "but they said that it was so bad that the surface of the Yangtze
River was literally covered with bodies and blood. My grandparents were
almost separated during World War II, and my mother almost died because
the Japanese had bombed the hospital where my grandmother had been staying
when she was pregnant with my mother in 1940. And when I was a little girl,
I tried to find information on the rape of Nanking in the local library
[in Illinois], but there was nothing there. In college, I tried finding
information, but no one had written a book that had penetrated the mass
consciousness."
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Among other discoveries, Chang has obtained the diaries of foreign missionaries
and German Nazis living in China during the war, many of whom sheltered
Chinese victims of Japanese atrocities. She has identified a man she calls
"the Oskar Schindler of China," a German Nazi named John Rabe, as well
as an American "Anne Frank," named Minnie Vautrin who committed suicide
in the International Safety Zone in Nanking during the massacre. Chang
points out that, according to the diaries, the atrocities in Nanking were
so brutal, "even the Nazis were shocked."
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About Illinois Wesleyan University
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IWU, founded in 1850, enrolls about 2,000 students in a College of Liberal
Arts, College of Fine Arts, and a four-year professional School of Nursing.
A $15 million athletics and recreation center opened in the fall of 1994
and a $25 million science center opened in fall 1995. The $5.1 million
Center for Liberal Arts, a facility housing 60 faculty offices, six classrooms,
and other facilities for social science, humanities, business and economics,
and interdisciplinary studies' faculty, opened in August 1997, as did a
new $6.8 million residence hall. The Carnegie Commission for the Advancement
of Teaching promoted Illinois Wesleyan to a "Baccalaureate I" institution
in 1994, a classification that places it among 159 highly-selective National
Liberal Arts Colleges in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, another respected college guide,
rated IWU "highly competitive +" in its latest edition.