- The Nanjing Massacre -
In those dark days, with savage beasts running amok in the city, the people of Nanjing engaged in a life and death struggle with the frenzied Japanese and displayed the unyielding spirit of the Chinese race.
In a situation in which weapons were not available, the people of Nanjing undertook to fight against the Japanese with their bare hands. The case of the driver Liang Zhicheng is a typical example. On the morning of December 17th, [1937], the Japanese came and broke down the front door of Liang Zhicheng's house and carried him away. When the Japanese officers discovered he was a driver, they ordered him to drive a truck filled with machine gun bullets to Xiaguan. Liang decided there was simply no way he could transport bullets which would be used to shoot down his fellow countrymen. So when he was pushed into the truck and a Japanese officer pointed a gun at him and ordered him to drive, disregarding the threat to his life, he knocked the officer to the ground. Liang rushed at the Japanese officer with all his might and seized his throat with both hands. When the Japanese soldiers in the truck saw what was going on, they jumped down off the truck and began to slash away at Liang Zhicheng with their long knives. Meanwhile, the Japanese officer scrambled to get up, grabbed his revolver, and shot Liang Zhicheng. Liang fell down and passed out in a pool of blood. By the afternoon, Liang had regained consciousness so he struggled to crawl back to his house. But by dawn of the next day, Liang Zhicheng realized that he was not long for this world. He clenched his teeth and said to his elder sister, "Tell my friends that I was murdered by the Japanese. You must tell everyone that, right up until my death, not once did I lift a finger to help the Japanese!" (See Xinhua Daily, 3 March 1951)
According to the recollections of Wu Haoyu and Mao Delin of the University of Nanking, in 1938 there was a Chinese kitchen worker in the Japanese embassy who harbored an immense hatred towards the Japanese. When the ambassador was hosting a party one evening, this man slipped poison into the wine, killing several Japanese. Just before leaving, this kitchen worker left a note saying that it was he who poisoned the wine and that no one else was involved.
On December 19th, 1937, a fine rain was falling. Li Xiuying, the wife of Chen Haoran (who, after 1949, joined the staff of the Nanjing Telecommunications Bureau, long-distance telephone section), was pregnant with a seven-month-old baby. She fled to the refugee hostel at Wutai Mountain and hid in the cellar of a schoolhouse run by an American. More than 100 female compatriots were already packed into this cellar. They fully assumed that the cellar would be safe for the time being. That morning, however, six Japanese soldiers wielding bayonets viciously broke into the schoolhouse. They forced the women out of the cellar and proceeded to humiliate them in various ways. Li Xiuying was unwilling to tolerate being humiliated by the Japanese soldiers and steeled herself to lay down her life resisting them. When a soldier stretched out his claws to take hold of her, she smashed her head against the wall. The fresh blood flowed out and she lost consciousness. But the treacherous Japanese soldiers were still unwilling to let the woman be. Only after brutally kicking her did they finally flee the scene. When Li Xiuying regained consciousness, her fellow refugees hurried her back inside. But soon after, three more Japanese soldiers showed up. Although Li Xiuying had sustained serious injuries, she simply could not hold her intense anger inside. She struggled to get up and charged towards the Japanese soldiers. Grabbing the bayonet at one soldier's waist, she stabbed him with all her might, but one of the other Japanese soldiers had already seized her hand. The soldiers proceeded to stab in a wild frenzy at her face, body, legs, and stomach. Li Xiuying was transformed into a bloodied mass of flesh, and again she passed out. After a while, she regained consciousness once again, but the baby had miscarried. In the end, Li Xiuying survived, but more than thirty scars could still be seen distinctly on her body. (See, Xinhua Daily, 23 February 1951)
There were many other women besides Li Xiuying who, although they sacrificed their lives in the struggle against the Japanese, will live on forever in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. For example, outside of Zhonghua Gate there was a Japanese train which was departing from Zhonghua Gate Train Station. When the train was drawing near Ban Bridge, a woman limped out onto the tracks and walked towards the train. There was no time to apply the brakes. The moment the locomotive hit the woman there was a great explosion throwing the train off the tracks and killing several hundred Japanese. It is said that the woman's family had been completely exterminated by the Japanese and that she had sworn to avenge their deaths. So this woman joined the guerrillas, tied sticks of dynamite all over her body, and perished with her Japanese foes. (See, Bai Wu, Contemporary Nanjing, published 20 November 1938)
There was a female teacher at Bafuqiao Primary School whom the Japanese attempted to rape on five separate occasions. Sometime afterwards, she managed to obtain a gun which she hid under her bed. When the Japanese showed up again, she killed five of them, one after the other. In the end, she calmly allowed herself to be executed. (See, Xinhua Daily, 26 February 1951)
Ma San and his wife lived on Baoshan Road in Xiaguan. When a Japanese soldier came by to rape her, Ma San's wife plied him with wine and got him drunk. Then, with the help of Masan and their neighbors, she used a large watermelon knife to kill the soldier. They secreted the body away to Wild Lotus Root Pond where they gave it a sunken burial. (See Xinhua Daily, 2 March 1951)
Liu Rouyuan, a man who fled from occupied Nanjing, wrote a document
entitled, "A Record of the Miserable Conditions in the Occupied Areas." In
his account, Liu tells of one time in which three Japanese soldiers forced
three women to return with them to their barracks. Two of the women were
shouting wildly and crying for help. The other woman realized that she had
no chance to escape death, so she requested that the other two women be set
free and offered herself to "comfort" the Japanese men. After the Japanese
soldiers had released the two screaming women and they had walked to the
Refugee Relief Society, this female compatriot, who never even left her
name, grabbed a bayonet from the Japanese soldier and stabbed herself in
the neck. Bleeding profusely, the woman fell to the ground. Another woman
was subjected to various harassments when the Japanese broke into her home.
On several previous occasions when this had occurred, the woman relied on
her quick wit to escape from the clutches of the Japanese. On this
particular day when the Japanese showed up at her house, she calmly took up
her brush and wrote in big Chinese characters on a piece of paper,
"Japanese soldiers are animals" 
. When she had finished writing,
she quietly put down the brush. Seeing the note, the Japanese soldiers were
incensed and proceeded to riddle the woman with bullets.
On the night before the fall of Nanjing, a Chinese tank was disabled by the Japanese and left behind on the highway during a skirmish at Square Mountain. Two warriors inside [the tank] swore to defend the vehicle to the death. They lay in ambush inside the tank awaiting an opportunity to attack the enemy. At about four o'clock in the afternoon, a large battalion of foot soldiers passed by the vehicle. The two warriors inside quietly took up their machine guns, poked them out of the front and back of the tank's turret, and sprung their ambush by firing into the crowds of Japanese. Dozens of Japanese soldiers were killed or wounded. When the Japanese were entering the vicinity of Nanjing, "there were three companies of [Chinese] soldiers . . . dispatched to cross over the Sancha River, located three miles outside of the city, to fight this large contingent of advancing Japanese soldiers. But because the number of soldiers on the two sides was so unequal, all three [Chinese] companies were sacrificed and only one man from the entire group survived. ("A Foreigner's Eyewitness Account of the Atrocities Committed by the Japanese Army," p.16.42)
In spite of her advanced age, Li Boqian's mother, who lived near Zhonghua Gate, refused to help guide the Japanese and was killed as a result. One day, in the square located at the end of New Street, a wireless radio was discovered broadcasting news reports on our war of resistance against the Japanese. The broadcasts continued for quite a while before it was dismantled by the Japanese. Another day, Chinese planes appeared in the skies over Nanjing. In order to direct the planes to drop their bombs on the Japanese military arsenal located near the Judicial Yuan buildings, an anonymous hero stood behind these buildings frantically waving a bamboo pole with a bed sheet attached to it. This brave hero was willing to sacrifice his life and perish together with his enemy. But no bombs were dropped from the plane and this anonymous martyr was seized by the Japanese and, sadly, was killed. (Contemporary Nanjing)
In 1939, Professor Bates43 of the International Red Cross Committee of Nanking wrote a report on the pain and suffering of the people in the city. The report describes how the Japanese would break into people's houses in the middle of the night. "After several cases of Japanese soldiers disappearing without a trace, they no longer dared to disturb people under the cover of night." (Nanjing Historical Archives, number 228, file 10.) On January 14th, 1943, not long after the Japanese had imposed a curfew, a bomb was detonated in front of the New Asia Dance Hall, killing four Japanese. All of these incidents of rebellion occurred spontaneously and stand as a solid testimony that the burning, killing, raping, and plundering committed by the Japanese could not make the Chinese people submit.
