Summary Of Iris Chang's The Rape Of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking is a best selling book published in 1997 written by Iris Chang. The story follows the events that took place for six weeks starting on the 13th of December, 1937 through January 1938 within Nanking, China; the capital at the time. The occupation of Nanking lead by the Japanese resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese children, women, men and elderly alike. There was no discrimination in the eyes of the young and obedient Japanese soldiers, their mission was to take and hold Nanking. It seemed that whatever they wanted to do was to be met with no consequence. Reading Chang’s book was one of the first time in my life that I was introduced the unjust executions of so many that took place within those six …show more content…
Had it not been for their decision to flee and raise a family in what eventually was the United States, this text may have never came to fruition. The second reason being the fact that the occupation of Nanking was “swept under the rug” in a sense; meaning that it was sort of buried in history and a large population of the world has no idea that one of the biggest mass casualty incidents occurred within these six weeks. Full of motivation and a glimmering hope to shed light on the events of the winter of 1937 Iris Chang began her journey to produce the controversial work titled The Rape of Nanking. The Rape of Nanking was a widely controversial piece because of the events that it sheds light on. In her book Chang estimates that somewhere around three-hundred thousand Chinese soldiers as well as civilians were unjustly victimized and in many cases literally tortured or raped to death. The Japanese occupation of Nanking was met with almost no resistance, for the most part the Chinese soldiers surrendered to the Japanese and posed no threat to them. What seem like something that could have been an almost deathless coup turned out to be have the largest death tolls of any war related event. Chang made it