On August 3rd, Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University, hosted a workshop entitled “The enemy of my enemy is my….enemy? War criminals in the PRC and the various roads to justice” that was presented by Professor of East Asian History, Barak Kushner from the University of Cambridge.

The presentation discussed the treatments of War Criminals in China, aiming to understand the war from different angles rather than the European-oriented concepts and the course of reconciliation more effectively. In the beginning, Professor Kushner explained four strands of War Criminals in postwar China, which were Japanese soldiers and officials; Manchurian/Mongolian officials; Kuo Min Tang (KMT) war criminals; and the repatriated Chinese’s People Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers after the Korean War in 1953, which was not officially regarded as war criminals but forced to undergo “re-education” to re-enter Chinese society, treated as such.

Professor Kushner questioned why China published confessions of Japanese war criminals, but not Chinese. Furthermore, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used the international framework to trail Japanese war criminals while not using the same framework when dealing with the Kuo Min Tang (KMT), which brought the notion of “competitive justice” into the discussion.

His findings from the war crime trials and interviews demonstrated common sentiments regarding who was referred to as the Japanese war criminals, while less attention was paid to Pu Yi and Kuo Min Tang (KMT). Was that a version of the narrative of history told by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an effort to show its ‘postwar political position’? The presentation invited many intriguing questions for further research, most importantly, whether the application of the unilateral and the multilateral framework of seeking justice by the PRC impacted the ‘role of justice’ into the war criminals strands. At the end of the presentation, he concluded that the PRC needed to persuade international and domestic audiences of Japanese war criminals.