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Preparing the People for Mass Clemency: The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in Shenyang and Taiyuan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2011

Justin Jacobs
Justin Jacobs
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The lack of official government attention to Japanese war crimes during the Mao years has been widely acknowledged. Yet in the summer of 1956, years of preparatory work by Zhou Enlai culminated in the little-known and summarily dismissed trials of 1,062 self-confessed Japanese war criminals in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The extraordinarily lenient sentences given to 45 of the worst offenders – and wholesale pardons of 1,017 – were prompted by larger geopolitical considerations that effectively hamstrung PRC authorities from bringing the trials into closer alignment with previous ones in Europe and Japan. Zhou's determination to adopt a “policy of leniency” towards the Japanese prisoners, however, was sorely at odds with the sentiments of the general public. The need to prepare the people for a counterintuitive mass clemency saw a sudden and drastic shift in media discourse in 1954, followed by a series of remarkable cultural and intellectual campaigns that were designed to persuade the Chinese people that they should henceforth let bygones be bygones.

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Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 205 , March 2011 , pp. 152 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2011

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62 The subtitle of Liu Jiachang's book, among many others, characterizes 1950s Chinese thought reform as a “miracle” (qiji).