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The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanjing (Nanking), and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanjing on December 13, 1937, the precise number remains unknown. Since the late-1960s when the first academic works on the Nanjing Massacre were produced, estimating the approximate death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of scholarly debate. Currently, the most reliable and widely agreed upon figures place the massacre victims within Nanjing City Walls to be around 40,000, mostly massacred in the first five days from December 13, 1937; while the total victims massacred as of the end of March 1938 in both Nanjing and its surrounding six rural counties far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000. Hence, depending on the timeframe and the geographic scope, an empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range is from over 40,000 to under 200,000. The center of the debate rests on the validity of burial records and oral history. A lesser debate rests on who among the dead should be included as "massacre victims". Numbers smaller or larger than the empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range have been put forward by Japanese revisionists and the China Communist Party. Some of the lowest estimates have counted only 10,000 deaths, while the government of China maintains that approximately 300,000 people were killed. Background In July 1937 war broke out in northern China between China and Japan, and by August the fighting had spread to the city of Shanghai. After capturing Shanghai the Japanese Army decided on December 1 to continue its military campaign to the capital city of the Nationalist government of China, Nanjing, which is roughly 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. Although the Japanese succeeded in surrounding Nanjing and defeating the Chinese garrison stationed there by December 13, few of the Chinese soldiers within the city formally surrendered. Instead they threw away their uniforms and weapons and hid among the city's civilian population. Over the course of its subsequent occupation of Nanjing the Japanese Army hunted down the former Chinese soldiers within the city and in a large number of cases summarily executed them. At the same time soldiers of the Japanese Army also committed random acts of murder against civilians, and engaged in torture, rape, arson, and looting. These events are collectively known as the Nanjing Massacre. Early estimates The Nanjing Massacre was reported internationally within a week of occurring and the first estimate of the full death toll was published on January 24, 1938, in the New China Daily. Here Australian journalist Harold Timperley was quoted as stating that 300,000 civilians had been killed. However, Timperley's source for this number was the French humanitarian Father Jacquinot, who was in Shanghai at the time of the massacre, and it might also have included civilian casualties of the Battle of Shanghai. Timperley included a second estimate in his book published later the same year, Japanese Terror In China, which quoted "a foreign member of the University faculty" as stating that "close to 40,000 unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanking". The source of this information was Miner Searle Bates, an American resident in Nanjing who had used the burial records of the Red Swastika Society in his calculations. These same estimates were commonly cited by reporters and the media. In his 1941 book The Battle for Asia, Edgar Snow states that 42,000 were massacred in Nanjing and 300,000 in total between Nanjing and Shanghai. The 1944 film The Battle of China claims 40,000 were killed in the Nanjing Massacre. Another early estimate was that of China's state-run Central News Agency, which reported in February 1938 that the Japanese had slaughtered 60,000 to 70,000 POWs in Nanjing. The same month a representative of the Nationalist Government of China claimed that the Japanese had killed 20,000 civilians during the Nanjing Massacre. However, in a 1942 speech Chiang Kai-shek raised that figure to "over 200,000 civilians". In 1938 the Red Army of the Chinese Communist Party reported the total death toll at 42,000 massacred. John Rabe, the German head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Chinese were killed in Nanjing, though this estimate included both military casualties and massacred civilians. After the end of the war between China and Japan in 1945, these estimates were in turn supplanted by the findings of two war crime trials, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. In one estimate the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal put the death toll at more than 300,000, though the Tribunal also recorded other estimates including one of 430,000. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East tallied up 155,000 victims of the massacre, though in their verdict against General Iwane Matsui this figure was modified somewhat to "upwards of 100,000 people". However, the prosecution at these trials made little effort to verify the accuracy of their death toll estimates and a considerable amount of dubious and now discredited data was accepted by both tribunals. The first historian to make an academic estimate of the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre was Tomio Hora in his 1967 book Kindai Senshi no Nazo ("Riddles of Modern War History"), who argued in favor of 200,000. Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. However, emotional arguments and political interference in the debate have tended to hinder the construction of an academic consensus on the number of people killed in the atrocity. Sources and application David Askew, a historian at Ritsumeikan University, states that the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre can be calculated by modern-day historians on the basis of four types of sources. The first type of source is oral history, but he calls this "the most problematic methodology in researching the incident" due in part to large discrepancies between the testimony of Japanese and Chinese eyewitnesses. The second type of source is the burial records written down by Chinese charitable associations. The IMTFE stated that a total of 155,300 corpses were buried in and around Nanjing after the fall of the city, based on statistics from the Red Swastika Society and the Chongshantang, though many historians now discount the accuracy of the burials recorded by the Chongshantang. Consequently, Askew estimates that the true number of corpses buried in and around Nanjing was 17,500, whereas military historian Masahiro Yam.... Discover the Robert Sabella Feifei Li David Liu popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Robert Sabella Feifei Li David Liu books.