China History
Noteworthy Weibo Post by Embassy of Germany in China About What Happened in 1989
A Weibo post by the Embassy of Germany in China focuses on what happened in both countries in 1989, but the China part is blacked-out.
Chapter Dive
Evil Unbound (731): How a Chinese Anti-Japanese War Film Backfired
731 was China’s most anticipated war movie of the year — how could it fail so miserably to live up to public expectations?
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731 and 918, those were the numbers dominating Chinese social media over the past week. Both numbers carry heavy historical weight, but the recent discussions surrounding them reveal two parallel worlds of the official narrative vs the audience experience of a controversial new World War II film.
It was “9.18” on Thursday, when China commemorated the 94th anniversary of the September 18th Incident (九一八事变). On that day in 1931, a small explosion on a Japanese-owned railway near Shenyang (Mukden) was used as a pretext to invade Manchuria.
While many older Chinese were taught in school that the war began in 1937, recent state-led campaigns increasingly emphasize 1931 as the true beginning of China’s “14-year-long war” (1931–1945). Over the past decade, the 918 commemorations have become more prominent online, shaping public memory through nationalistic messaging.
This year, the commemoration had an extra dimension, as it wove the release of Evil Unbound (English title), also known as 731, into the patriotic media narratives around 918.
Patriotic film poster putting 918 and 731 together.
The much-anticipated war movie 731depicts the atrocities of Japan’s Unit 731 (731部队), notorious for conducting horrific biological warfare experiments in Harbin during World War II under Major General Shiro Ishii (石井四郎), a former army surgeon and biologist with a particular interest in historical plagues. Under his command, Japan’s biological warfare and human experimentation in China were carried out on a larger scale than anywhere…
Chapter Dive
Dialogues Across Time: Remembering War in a New China
“We are not friends, and have never been,” is a line that went viral recently in light of the heightened focus on war in Chinese media and popular culture.
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“Comrade, are you from the new China?”
A man in a blood-stained 1940s PLA uniform sits in the grass beside a modern Chinese soldier in full combat gear, staring at him with quiet intensity. When told he is indeed from the “new China,” the old soldier leans closer and asks: “So… did we win?”
“We did,” the…
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Melanie Faber
October 31, 2022 at 7:09 pm
In Germany we think that these two events in 1989 are indeed connected, at least from the German point of view. We speculate whether what happened at Tian’anmen prevented a similar tragedy in Germany because nobody wanted to repeat something like that.