The Marco Polo Bridge--and Museum

Late in March, on almost a whim, several of us accompanied program director Dr. Youli Sun to the Marco Polo bridge on a Saturday morning. Although an example of ancient Chinese bridge architecture, a protected historical site, and a fascinating trip in its own right, the Marco Polo bridge is also notable as the start of World War II, where Japanese and Chinese troops exchanged fire in 1937.

Steve Will, a friend of mine from Washington State, had lived the previous year in Japan (incidentally, where he met his current Chinese girlfriend). He had warned me that animosity between the Chinese and Japanese was something to look out for, and at first, I didn’t believe him. Although sure, China and Japan were historic rivals, and had gotten into some pretty serious fights during the past two centuries, I figured the United States had pretty bad fights, and you didn’t see a national animosity towards Germany anymore. Why should it be different?

Next to the Marco Polo bridge sat the“Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japan.” Not the World War II museum. Not the Great War museum. The Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japan. While naming may not seem like much, I couldn’t think–at all–of any similarly named museum in the U.S. We had the Smithsonian, various Museums named for the city or subject or donor, but nothing named as such. The closest analogy I could think of was the Holocaust Museum, as it dealt with a very specific evil in the past, but even so, it wasn’t named the Museum of the War Against the German Nazis.

Sure enough, inside was a masterfully constructed museum, full of colorful displays, intriguing historical relics, and propaganda of the purest order. Although sticking to a true historical outline, the displays–even in Chinese–were so blatantly constructed as to make us all shake our heads in disbelief. Prominent on the walls in between “historical” displays were paintings of the “brave” Chinese soldiers putting up heroic fights against the “barbaric” Japanese invaders. Of course, as a Communist government work, I noticed that certain historical facts–such as how the CCP did not control China at the time, and that Chaing Kai-Shek’s Nationalist party likewise fought the Japanese. Nope, it was the single handed struggle of the peasants and Communists that beat back the evil Japanese.

Freakiest of all was this image, located near the end of the museum. At first, I thought it was maybe a count of money, or the number of Chinese troops involved in the conflict. Nope! This lit graph measured the number of Japanese killed each year by the Chinese troops.

One display, however, was particularly heart-rending, because this was the only room I suspect had not been dramatized for history: the room commemorating the “rape of Nanking.” In late 1937, the invading Japanese army entered Nanking, one of China’s larger cities, and captured the city with little military resistance. For the next several weeks, documents and photographs and eyewitnesses prove, the Japanese army raped, tortured, and murdered anywhere from 100,000 (Japanese accounts) to 300,000 (Chinese accounts) men, women, and children in Nanking. With the memory of the Holocaust very clearly on our minds, we looked at the photographs of mass graves, disemboweled bodies, and severed limbs filled the display, providing a stark reminder that, as irrational as Chinese hatred of Japan seemed, perhaps it was not utterly inexcusable. The refusal of contemporary Japanese officials to even acknowledge the incident provides another subtext for the simmering passions between the two people even today.

Other things caught our eyes as we kept traveling. In Xining, outside the Buddhist temple, we noticed a 119 billboard–the loose equivalent of 911 in China. What Steve noticed, however, was that the city pictured behind the advertisement was not China. It was Tokyo. The subtext seemed hardly subtle: in the event the Japanese attack or invade, call the police!

The attitude was so subtle that at first I didn’t notice, but it was clear that if nothing else, the government had a convenient enemy in the Japanese. It is an age old tactic to unite the people you lead by providing a common enemy–for good or for ill—and clearly the CCP sees no problem in keeping the relations between the two nations more hostile than necessary, for what could be historical, or more cynical reasons.

Back in Washington, D.C., I noticed what America, who had lost 3,000 sailors and civilians in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and tens of thousands more in the War in the Pacific, had done to commemorate the war. Sure enough, I found the “Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II.”