# The Rape of Nanking book. Was it a factual account?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-rape-of-nanking-book-was-it-a-factual-account/595231>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [September 5, 2011, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-rape-of-nanking-book-was-it-a-factual-account/595231 "2011-09-05T04:33:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![lisacurl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/41988e/32.png) [@lisacurl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lisacurl)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2011, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-rape-of-nanking-book-was-it-a-factual-account/595231/21 "2011-09-08T03:06:59Z")

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> [@China\_Guy](#):
>
> Well, yes, actually I do. They don’t want this forgotten nor do they want it fictionalized. It was a nasty brutal time within the nasty brutal Sino-Japanese war.
> 
> I hope I’m not being misconstrued. Iris Chang sensationalized an atrocity that needed no sensationalization. It’s undisputable that tens of thousands of Chinese died in the immediate aftermath of Nanking. Records of the KMT, Communists, foreign observers, etc all more or less agree. Iris exaggerated, took hearsay as fact, redefined the Rape of Nanking to span all direct, indirect and potentially indirect vitims and did anything she could to make it hundreds of thousands of dead. This makes it easy for the Rape of Nanking deniers/ultranationalists in Japan to pick her most outrageous and probably fictional claims, debunk them, and by extension make the case the Rape of Nanking never happend.

There is no way to indicate tone of voice here other than smileys, which seem horrifically inappropriate in this thread, but my question was genuine and not meant as a challenge. I think Chang was a very well-intentioned writer who was trained as a journalist, not a historian, as pointed out earlier in the thread. That possibly explains her errors of fact and exaggeration. I also think her emotional instability caused her to come to view advocating for the victims of Nanking as a personal mission. She might have ended her life eventually in any case, but I think her choice of subject matter accelerated the process.

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