War Criminals and the Road to Sino-Japanese Normalization: Zhou Enlai and the Shenyang Trials, 1954-1956

On 19 June 1956, eight Japanese prisoners entered a brightly lit military courtroom in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang (沈阳). Having emerged from their prison in neighboring Fushun (抚顺) and borne the shame of public confessions of crimes ranging from the massacre of Chinese civilians to the promotion of Japanese "cultural imperialism (文化帝国主义 wenhua diguozhuyi)" in Manchukuo, the repentant war criminals now stood to receive their verdicts. With the judicial announcement that death sentences had been rejected, and that most of the war criminals would soon be released back to Japan, cries escaped the lips of the convicts and their tears welled up. Throughout, flashbulbs exploded and Xinhua film reels whirred, recording the spectacle of justice for its ultimate conveyance to audiences on the Chinese mainland and in Japan.¹

Watching carefully from Beijing was Zhou Enlai (周恩來 1898-1976), the man whose orders had initiated the trials and whose foreign ministry was using every power at its disposal to promote the trials and render the subsequent release of the war criminals as a propaganda success. In the mid-1950s, Zhou was in the midst of orchestrating a major turn in Chinese policy toward Japan; and, indeed, mass amnesty and repatriation of Japanese war criminals played an important component in the foreign minister's drive toward rapprochement. The policy of magnanimity adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (共产党 [CCP]) toward the war criminals was, further, a significant component in Zhou Enlai's "people's diplomacy (民間外交 minjian waijiao)" offensive toward Japan. Beginning in the early summer of 1956 more than fifty Japanese stood trial in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The trials marked the high point in PRC prosecutions of Japanese for war crimes, coinciding precisely with China's unmistakable push for diplomatic normalization with Japan.

Because the trials intersect with so many important narratives of twentieth-century Chinese history, it is surprising that so little has been written about the proceedings. The burgeoning literature on Chinese Communist domestic and foreign policy in the 1950s rarely engages the trials as an object of inquiry.² Mainland historians tend to take the trials more seriously as a component of the Sino-Japanese relationship, but mostly follow the CCP's predetermined narrative that emphasizes the humanity displayed by the CCP toward the war criminals, implicitly modeling the "correct" form of penitence for guilty Japanese.³ Similar trials were taking place all across the Communist bloc in the 1950s, but the Shenyang proceedings have eluded comparison with other trials in that period.⁴ The Soviet trial and repatriation of German prisoners of war after 1954 has been well studied, for instance, and its remarkable similarities to the procedure and intent of the Shenyang trials could be profitably juxtaposed.⁵ Scholars of prisoner of war (POW) culture in East Asia in the 1950s might also find the trials noteworthy.⁶ Beyond such comparisons, the Shenyang proceedings as documented in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives (中国外交部档案馆 Zhongguo waijiaobu dang'anguan) could fuel further discussion of Sino-Soviet relations, war and memory, "thought reform (思想改革 sixiang gaige)" among prisoners, and, of course, the wide range of political campaigns occurring in China in that unique year of 1956.

Historical Background

The 1956 trials at Shenyang grew out of the CCP's need to accelerate overtures towards Japan, but the trials were also entwined with larger issues of repatriation of Japanese after 1945. In the absence of Japanese diplomatic recognition of the new Chinese People's Republic, people-to-people contacts, particularly the thousands of Japanese who had remained in China after 1945, kept the two nations connected. Many of these Japanese had migrated to Manchuria and North China in the 1930s, and in "staying on" after 1949, actively aided the CCP in its revolutionary aims.⁷ However, as Japan regained control over its foreign affairs after the formal end of the U.S. occupation in 1952, influential newspapers like Mainichi shinbun (毎日新聞) and civil groups in Japan began to put pressure on the PRC to repatriate all Japanese from China immediately. Using evocative...