Someone once told Running Dog that the great thing about the Cultural Revolution was that it allowed the Chinese public to forget about the past and get on with recreating the country anew, thus paving the way for the economic reforms of the past two decades. However, for better or worse, it doesn’t seem to have wiped away the memory of Japanese war crimes.
Today, Beijing rag Xin Jing Bao (The Beijing News) draws our attention to what appears to be a respectable website aimed at collecting information about the victims of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937 to help sue the Japanese government. The names of surviving victims, as well as countless scans of the letters they have written, are painstakingly collected together to provide a unique historical record… et cetera.
However, a brief perusal of the site seems to indicate that the whole thing has been created by obsessive cranks, with a whole section dedicated to the theory that SARS was a genetic weapon manufactured by enemies.
We earnestly suggest to the editors of Xin Jing Bao to be more careful.