In Japan-China: Why All the Fuss?, Ralph Kinney Bennett explains what the Chinese are still upset about:
While the western world was concentrating on an approaching Christmas that marked a slow economic rise out of the Depression and on Adolf Hitler’s continuing ‘diplomacy’ in Europe, the bloodbath of Nanking made some headlines but relatively little impact outside Asia. The conservative estimate of civilian deaths at the hands of Japanese soldiers in and around Nanking was 260,000. Some experts place the figure at 350,000.This was one city, in a period of less than two months. France and Belgium each lost over 100,000 civilians in the whole course of World War II. Great Britain lost 61,000. But the Chinese at Nanking were literally slaughtered by the thousands — beheaded, bayoneted, burned alive, machine-gunned. Their bodies choked canals, rivers and ponds until the water actually ran red.
And in the bitter memory of the Chinese, it was not just the loss of life, but the cruel élan with which the Japanese carried out the atrocities. At the height of the slaughter in Nanking, a Japanese soldier noted that “a pig is more valuable now than the life of a human being. That’s because a pig is edible.”