THESIS
2002
Abstract
The end of cold war, the revival of nationalism, the rise of human rights concern and the development of information technology give rise to the rising tide of reparations demand in China and Asia at the end of the 20
th century. The Chinese WWII victims of war crime have been demanding historical justice, sincere apology and legal claim towards Japan Government and Japanese corporations. The wave of reparations among Asian victims is the response of a delayed justice, an attempt to restore human dignity from the defects of the Tokyo War Crime Trial and the San Francisco Peace Treaty....[
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The end of cold war, the revival of nationalism, the rise of human rights concern and the development of information technology give rise to the rising tide of reparations demand in China and Asia at the end of the 20
th century. The Chinese WWII victims of war crime have been demanding historical justice, sincere apology and legal claim towards Japan Government and Japanese corporations. The wave of reparations among Asian victims is the response of a delayed justice, an attempt to restore human dignity from the defects of the Tokyo War Crime Trial and the San Francisco Peace Treaty.
Compared with the American, the Canadian, the Dutch, the Korean and the Philippines counterparts, the Chinese war crime victims are the most silent group, despite the fact that they suffered the most from the Japanese militarism in WWII. This thesis is an attempt to analyze, from the state-society relations perspective, the demand for reparations in contemporary China.
Research data is collected mainly by interviewing more than 20 activists and 50 Chinese war crime victims of different kinds, including the survivors of massacre, the sex slaves (comfort women), the forced labors, the victims of indiscriminative bombing, chemical-bacteria warfare and biological experiment. Drawing from this variety of data, this paper attempts to analyze the reasons for their silence over half century, and explores the reasons for their redress in recent years.
Findings show that organizational and institutional limitation, nationalism and ideology constituted obstacles for reparations movement in China before 1978. During the wave of global reparations in 1990s, China Government was the major obstacle for reparations claim. With the change in government role and attitude in late 1990s and the forces of globalization, the demand for reparations among victims and activists were more active and the movement will be more significant in the coming years.
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