History by Decree

Song Gengyi, a journalism teacher in Shanghai, was fired last month for doing her job. She had encouraged her students to verify official accounts of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the orgy of mass murder and rape perpetrated in the then-Chinese capital by the Imperial Japanese Army. Another teacher, Li Tiantian, who protested against the firing, was punished by being committed to a psychiatric hospital .

Verifying facts is what journalists are supposed to do. But because the atrocity in Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War has become a cornerstone of Chinese nationalism, and thus of the Communist Party of China’s propaganda, any critical scrutiny of what precisely happened is seen as criticism of the Chinese government.