China has released a new collection of documents on the 1937 “Nanjing Massacre” in which over three lakh Chinese were killed allegedly by Japanese troops in eastern Jiangsu Province.
The provincial government has released the collection of historical documents which were complied during the last 10 years by more than 100 experts and scholars, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.The collection, jointly released by Jiangsu People’s Publishing Limited and Phoenix Publishing and Media Group on Wednesday, was the most elaborate and systematic historical works on the incident, said Zhang Xianwei, chief editor of the collection.
Earlier documents about the massacre had no more than two million Chinese characters, while the new collection has 40 million characters containing first-hand information translated from English, Japanese, German, Italian and Russian, Zhang said.
“Some Japanese did not admit the crimes they did, pushing us to carry out a thorough study,” Zhang said, adding the collection will help both Chinese and Japanese people, especially the youth to have a correct understanding of the incident.
The previous accounts by survivors accused Japanese troops of occupying Nanjing city in eastern China on 13th December, 1937, and carried out a six-week massacre in which over three lakh Chinese were killed and thousands raped.