This is not an attempt to deny that civilians suffered and died in Nanjing, nor is it a rejection of mourning or remembrance. Respect for victims is not the issue here. What is being questioned is the narrative and the specific numerical claim that the Chinese Communist Party has been actively promoting and attempting to fix as unquestionable historical fact.
The figure of “300,000 victims” is repeatedly asserted, yet it has not been demonstrated as the result of a reproducible accumulation of primary sources. In historical scholarship, casualty figures are not moral declarations but analytical estimates. They require transparency regarding who calculated them, when, which primary sources were used, what geographical and temporal scope was applied, and how uncertainties were handled. In this case, such a methodology has not been clearly shown. The number appears to have solidified through postwar tribunal rhetoric, commemorative narratives, and repeated political usage, rather than through verifiable historical analysis. A number established through repetition is fundamentally different from a number established through evidence.
There is also a serious inconsistency between this figure and the demographic and temporal realities of Nanjing in late 1937. Multiple third-party records by foreign missionaries, doctors, journalists, and members of the International Safety Zone Committee indicate that the city’s population had already declined sharply due to evacuation. These sources do describe killings and severe violence, but they do not provide concrete evidence of mass killing and corpse disposal on the scale of 300,000 within the limited time frame involved. This does not deny that atrocities occurred. It points to a lack of alignment between the asserted number, the reduced population, and the density of surviving documentation.
From an academic perspective, the most troubling aspect is that this number is treated as politically immutable. In normal historical research, casualty estimates are revised as new documents emerge or methodologies improve. Here, attempts to reassess the figure promoted by the Chinese Communist Party are often labeled as “denial” or moral wrongdoing. When a number is placed beyond verification, it ceases to function as scholarship and becomes a political symbol.
Questioning sources and methodology is then conflated with denying victims themselves. In academic practice, verification is not hostility but the basis of credibility. Fixed numbers may be politically useful because they are simple and emotionally powerful, but academically they are dangerous. This differs fundamentally from Holocaust historiography in Germany, where vast documentation is 공개 and scholarly revision remains possible.
This argument does not seek to erase the past. It argues that history should be strong enough to withstand scrutiny rather than enforced by political authority. Numbers that cannot be examined ultimately undermine trust in historical narratives themselves.