The Great Trials

After the victory in the War of Resistance in 1945, China's reckoning with Japanese war criminals did not end at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. From 1946 to 1949, the Nationalist government established military tribunals in Nanjing, Shanghai, Beiping, Hankou, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Taiyuan, Jinan, Xuzhou, and Taipei, and over four years tried more than eight hundred Japanese war criminals. This book is a specialized study by military historian Liu Tong, drawing on a large body of previously unpublished primary archives, trial records, and contemporary newspaper materials. It restores this almost forgotten judicial process in six parts: beginning with the establishment of the United Nations War Crimes Commission in London in 1942, it lays out the two stages of China's investigation of Japanese war crimes and the process of identifying, listing, and arresting war criminals; it then narrates the opening and conduct of trials in ten military tribunals one by one; next it offers detailed analysis of representative cases, including key criminals such as Hisao Tani and the collective trial of Japanese generals in Shanghai; and it also explains the proceedings of four important cases involving foreign parties. The book further discusses many legal and political issues of the trials, such as the dispute over when war crimes should be counted from, the interface between domestic and international law, and the establishment of thirty-eight categories of war crimes, and it includes a list of major Japanese war criminals and statistical tables of the trials for easy reference. The author turns dry courtroom materials back into a readable historical scene, letting readers see how Chinese judges and prosecutors completed this "great trial" under conditions of scarce evidence and turbulent times, and also see its significance in seeking justice for the Chinese people and enriching the practice of international law.