Author: Liu Fang Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Cheng Xiaoxiao Translator: Lyu Feng
Abstract:This article is dedicated to commemorating the innocent lives lost in the Nanjing Massacre and to discussing this history on the basis of respect for facts.
Whether the Nanjing Massacre occurred is not itself in dispute. What truly requires discussion is how the death toll has been calculated, how it has been interpreted, and how these numbers have been used within political narratives. Any historical conclusion that cannot withstand the most basic tests of population structure and arithmetic has already departed from the realm of historiography and entered that of political instrumentation.
Before 1937, Nanjing, as the capital of the Nationalist government, had a population approaching one million. As the military situation deteriorated rapidly, the government relocated southward, troops withdrew, schools were closed, and factories moved inland. Large-scale evacuation unfolded swiftly. Those leaving the city were predominantly young and middle-aged men, making Nanjing one of the cities with the most thorough evacuations nationwide—directly altering both the scale and structure of the city’s population.
Multiple independent third-party records provide highly consistent assessments of Nanjing’s population immediately before and after its fall. In December 1937, the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone stated in official documents that approximately 200,000 civilians were concentrated within the Safety Zone. Official telegrams from U.S. diplomatic personnel estimated the city’s population at between 200,000 and 250,000. German nationals responsible for Safety Zone affairs, as well as several missionaries and medical workers, reached similar conclusions based on shelter capacity. These sources were independent of one another, yet none ever cited a figure of 500,000—still less the claim that “300,000 civilians within the city were killed.”
From this, the first set of basic facts can be established: the total number of civilians inside Nanjing was approximately a little over 200,000.
The second unavoidable fact concerns the scale of survivors. After the Japanese army entered the city, the Nanjing Safety Zone did not immediately collapse; it continued to operate, concentrating and protecting approximately 200,000 civilians. These survivors were not abstract figures inferred after the fact, but concrete populations with documented residences, rations, and administrative records. Any narrative of Nanjing must acknowledge that at least around 200,000 civilians were clearly recorded as having survived within the city.
A third body of evidence lies in the population return and basic social recovery that occurred after the initial occupation period. This reality stands in evident tension, at the sociological and demographic levels, with the claim that a massacre of 300,000 civilians took place within the city. As hostilities subsided and conditions stabilized, some residents who had previously fled gradually returned, and the city began to function again. Some scholars note that population return alone cannot determine the scale of deaths; however, if a civilian massacre on the order of 300,000 had occurred within a short period, its social consequences would not be limited merely to population reduction. It would necessarily manifest as long-term, systemic obstacles to recovery: massive labor shortages, broken chains of production and services, and persistent terror induced by extreme violence, strongly suppressing any willingness to return. The expected outcome would therefore be slow return and prolonged dysfunction. Yet when the prewar population base, Safety Zone survivor records, and subsequent population return are considered together, Nanjing did not display the enduring social disorder commensurate with such a massive massacre. Basic living order was maintained, and social operations gradually resumed. This reality cannot be used to “prove” a specific death toll, but within the established population framework, it further weakens the plausibility of high death estimates in the context of the city proper.
When these facts are examined together, the contradiction becomes clear: the total number of civilians in the city was only a little over 200,000; approximately 200,000 were explicitly recorded as survivors; and postwar population return also occurred. Under these conditions, the claim that “300,000 civilians were killed within Nanjing city” is arithmetically untenable. To sustain this claim, one would have to assume that the city once contained far more than 500,000 civilians, or deny the existence of Safety Zone survivors, or treat returning residents as having appeared out of thin air—assumptions for which no contemporaneous evidence exists.
It is precisely here that the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative introduces a key premise: that there were once “500,000 civilians” within Nanjing. This figure does not appear in Safety Zone documents, diplomatic telegrams, or on-site records from 1937. It more closely resembles a population assumption retroactively constructed to accommodate a predetermined conclusion, its function being to create arithmetical space for the figure “300,000.”
To avoid the contradictions that follow, related narratives increasingly blur statistical boundaries, mixing city and countryside, civilians and soldiers, prisoners of war and routed troops, combat deaths and non-combat deaths—ultimately compressing deaths of different natures and responsibilities into a single emotionally charged integer. This approach is not historical scholarship, but a political narrative strategy.
More troubling still is the de facto monopoly this narrative exerts over numerical discussion. Any questioning is swiftly transformed into moral or political accusation; methodological issues are equated with ideological positions; evidentiary debate is excluded from the public sphere. In such a context, history is no longer permitted to be examined—it may only be repeated.
This selective fixation stands in stark contrast to the long-term silence surrounding mass deaths under CCP rule. The famine caused during the Great Leap Forward was labeled “three years of natural disasters,” with policy responsibility systematically erased. Deaths resulting from concealment, censorship, and repression of information during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic were quickly de-responsibilized and de-politicized. These lives lack sustained, public accounting, are not allowed to be seriously questioned, and are far from receiving institutional commemoration. Within this selective memory, Nanjing is continually magnified, becoming a safe object for deflecting responsibility and mobilizing emotion.
When Nanjing is repeatedly emphasized and endowed with a “non-negotiable” number, what truly demands scrutiny is no longer merely historical detail, but motive itself. Why does a regime obsessively amplify deaths caused by others while maintaining long-term silence—or even systematic erasure—of mass deaths under its own rule?
In such a narrative, Nanjing ceases to be a historical event for understanding the brutality of war and is transformed into a political instrument, used to manufacture hatred and divert attention. Victims are abstracted into numbers and symbols; history is frozen into an expression of emotion and a test of loyalty. This constitutes a second exploitation of the dead of Nanjing and a shared injury to all victims who are denied the right to be remembered.
Author: Zhao Lingjun Editor: Wang Mengmeng Managing Editor: Luo Zhifei Proofreader: Xiong Bian Translator: Lyu Feng
AbstractCentered on Jimmy Lai’s decision to refuse departure from Hong Kong and instead accept imprisonment, this article examines the moral and historical significance of what appears, under authoritarian rule, to be an irrational choice of “return and steadfastness.” Through a comparative reflection on Jimmy Lai, Alexei Navalny, and Pastor Kim Myung-il, the article argues that when language is monopolized by power, the human body and one’s fate themselves become indelible evidence. Their sacrifices may not immediately alter reality, yet they constitute the heaviest testimony of our time.
Amid sustained global attention, the Jimmy Lai case has finally entered a critical stage of adjudication.Mr. Lai has been convicted on three charges, including “collusion with foreign forces” and “conspiracy to publish seditious materials.” Having been detained for more than five years and subjected to a total of 156 days of hearings, Mr. Lai has at last been formally saddled with criminal charges imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Lai maintains his innocence; however, the three judges designated under the National Security Law have found him guilty.
Although the final sentence has yet to be announced, it is widely believed that the charge of “collusion with foreign forces and incitement to subvert state power” alone is sufficient to warrant life imprisonment. Mr. Lai is approaching eighty years of age, and the physical toll of prolonged incarceration has already become evident. Under the present political reality, there is scarcely any prospect of his regaining freedom.
And yet Mr. Lai has clearly prepared himself to face any outcome with equanimity.
In truth, this has always been his choice.
In the history of contemporary political persecution, there is a choice that appears again and again, and yet never fails to unsettle the conscience:knowing full well that imprisonment—or even death—lies ahead, one still chooses to remain, or to return.
Mr. Jimmy Lai is precisely someone who made such a choice.
As one of Hong Kong’s most internationally renowned media figures, he was by no means without an exit. He was a highly successful entrepreneur, possessed immense personal wealth, and held a British passport. Leaving Hong Kong would not have been difficult for him; continuing to speak out from overseas was entirely possible. Yet at the critical moment when Hong Kong’s freedoms were rapidly collapsing, he declined the advice of close friends, chose to stay, and was ultimately arrested and imprisoned.
On the eve of his detention, he gave an interview at his home in Kowloon to a BBC journalist. When the reporter attempted to ask—or rather, to remind him—whether he would remain in Hong Kong or move elsewhere to live, he answered calmly before the question was even finished:
“In prison.”
He said:
“Here, I am living calmly; in prison, I am living meaningfully.”
That was not a spontaneous remark. It was the clear self-understanding of a wise elder, fully aware of the path that lay ahead of him.
“To live meaningfully” was not a declaration of passion, but a lucid and solitary road of return.
That road leads to prison, to judgment, and also to history.
The choice did not arise from miscalculation, nor from emotional impulse, but from a sober and weighty judgment.
I. Why Not Leave?
Under authoritarian systems, “leaving” is often regarded as the rational choice.Safety, freedom, the ability to continue speaking out—these reasons appear unassailable.
But the real question is this:when all those with capacity and influence choose to leave, what remains for those who stay?
What is left behind is not only risk, but the forced burden of being labeled “losers” or “the abandoned.”Power completes the hollowing-out of society precisely through this mechanism.
Jimmy Lai refused to let such logic prevail. He said: I cannot leave. Once I leave, it would damage the credibility of Apple Daily and undermine the unity of the democratic movement. This responsibility must be borne by me.
His decision to stay signified a clear stance:not that he was unable to leave, but that he refused to allow “departure” to become the only legitimate choice.
II. When the Body Becomes Evidence
In totalitarian environments, language is the first thing to be distorted and emptied of meaning.Terms such as “rule of law,” “order,” “stability,” and “national security” are endlessly repeated, yet constantly redefined—until they ultimately serve dictatorship itself.
When language loses credibility, human experience becomes the final form of evidence.
Jimmy Lai’s arrest makes one thing unmistakably clear:the so-called “governing Hong Kong according to law” is not the law restraining power, but power commandeering the law.
His trial, in the most direct way possible, also demonstrates this reality:a Hong Kong that once prided itself on the rule of law and freedom has, in just over two decades of CCP rule, rapidly fallen—economic vitality eroded, the legal order collapsing, freedoms extinguished. As a result, all of the CCP’s justifications regarding Hong Kong’s freedom and prosperity appear increasingly hollow before global public opinion.
III. Parallel Roads of Return: Mr. Navalny and Pastor Kim Myung-il
They came from different countries and different faiths, yet they made the same choice.
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, after being poisoned and successfully treated, could have chosen to remain in Germany—staying with his family and continuing his struggle by other means. Yet he returned to Russia nonetheless. He knew perfectly well that what awaited him would be imprisonment, and possibly an even grimmer fate. Still, he chose to go back.
Because he understood this: if opposition can exist only in exile, then power has already secured the moral high ground.
His death ultimately laid bare the true nature of Russia’s political system.
In China, by contrast, Pastor Kim Myung-il confronted a different form of oppression. He could originally have chosen to remain in the United States, serve as a pastor there, live comfortably, and stay close to his family.
Yet he chose instead to return to China, where religious freedom is strictly controlled and even systematically dismantled. Fully aware of the constant risk of arrest, he continued to shepherd his congregation, preach, and bear witness.
Pastor Kim’s choice did not arise from political mobilization, but from faith itself. After his arrest, when speaking with visitors, he said that in the past, when he saw other pastors or preachers being detained, he felt powerless and deeply torn; now that he himself had been arrested, he instead felt a sense of calm.
By living out his faith with his own life—through fearless sacrifice—he gave profound expression to what it means to “die for the truth.”
They all understood this:if truth can be proclaimed only in places of safety, it loses its transcendence.
IV. Were Their Sacrifices “Worth It”?
This is a question that cannot be avoided.
Judged by immediate outcomes, their choices did not bring about instant change:Hong Kong did not regain its freedom.Russia did not move toward democracy.China’s space for religion and free expression remains severely constrained.
If measured solely by short-term effectiveness, these sacrifices might seem “not worth the cost.”
But history has never been composed of outcomes alone.The light they cast, however, will guide many out of darkness.
V. An Erasable Meaning That Cannot Be Erased
What authoritarian power most longs to manufacture is a consensus of submission:that lowering one’s head is rational,that silence is maturity,that survival matters more than dignity.
The very existence of Jimmy Lai, Alexei Navalny, and Pastor Kim Myung-il renders this narrative morally bankrupt.
They did not resort to violence, nor did they seek personal gain.They simply refused to cooperate with lies and insisted on truth.
For this very reason, they cannot be completely smeared—and they cannot be easily forgotten.
Conclusion: Those on the Road of Return
They do not ask those who come after them to replicate their path, for sacrifice has never been an obligation.Yet it is precisely because some are willing to bear the heaviest cost that those who follow still retain the freedom to choose whether to stand upright.
On the road of return, some depart, some fall silent, and others go back.
Jimmy Lai and other great martyrs chose return and steadfastness.And that choice itself has already become the clearest—and heaviest—annotation of our time.
Zhao Lingjun (Frank), Saturday, December 20, 2025, Canada
Dangerous Countries as Paradise, Safe Countries as Hell — The CCP’s Travel Logic
Abstract:China encourages its citizens to travel to dangerous destinations such as Russia and Cambodia, while issuing travel warnings against one of the world’s safest countries—Japan. This reflects the Chinese Communist Party’s need to maintain its rule through propaganda and ideological conditioning, thereby legitimizing its own oppressive governance.
Author: Mao Yiwei Editor: Hu Jing Proofreader: Xiong Bian Translator: Lyu Feng
Recently, a peculiar trend has suddenly swept across China. No sooner had visa-free entry to Russia been announced than propaganda surged as if following orders, flooding screens with calls of “Go now! It’s especially safe!” Cambodia has been praised in much the same way. One is a country plagued in reality by rampant telecom fraud and kidnappings; the other is a country where artillery fire continues daily along the front lines, with the war not yet over. Yet both are being touted as the most worthwhile tourist destinations on Earth. Anyone unfamiliar with the facts might truly believe they are idyllic vacation paradises.
Yet paradoxically, places such as Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the United States—countries with good public security, mature institutions, and stable tourist experiences—are portrayed like ferocious beasts. “Unsafe,” “anti-Chinese,” “absolutely don’t go”—such phrases resurface in domestic discourse every few months. Even Japan, one of the countries with the lowest crime rates in the world, is depicted as fraught with danger in their narrative.
A basic common sense is this: a normal country does not encourage its citizens to travel to war zones, nor does it urge people to flock to places with chaotic public security and weak institutions. Yet in reality, the Chinese Communist Party not only fails to warn people, but actively pressures them to go.
This is not because those places are safe, but because—those are places where the authorities feel confident you will not “see the world clearly.”
If you truly go to Japan, to the United States, to Europe, what you encounter—press freedom, social order, and the structure of the rule of law—is enough to tear open a crack in decades of propaganda. But if you go to Russia or Cambodia, the chaos and corruption you witness instead make you less likely to question the so-called “Chinese model.” Propaganda is not designed for your experience; it serves their political needs.
The greatest irony is that recently, I have repeatedly come across accounts on social media of Chinese tourists being extorted by corrupt police in Russia—fined under the pretext of “not having a residence permit.” How could tourists from a visa-free country possibly have a “residence permit”? This is naked extortion. The world has long known that police corruption in Russia is nothing new, yet domestic propaganda never mentions it even once, because that would undermine the carefully crafted image of a “friendly brotherly nation.”
Thus an absurd contrast emerges: the places the CCP desperately promotes are riddled with traps, while the places it fiercely tries to stop you from visiting are in fact the safest.
And this contrast was foreshadowed long ago at home. Passports of large groups—civil servants, teachers, banking system employees, and state-owned enterprise staff—are centrally confiscated, depriving them of the freedom to travel abroad. The justification is always the same mechanical phrases: “involving state secrets,” “unified management.” But everyone knows the truth: it is not about preventing leaks; it is about preventing them from seeing what the free world actually looks like.
That is why it must constantly exaggerate danger, manufacture fear, and distort reality—so that you recoil from truly normal countries; while at the same time lavishly praising those countries whose narratives it can control, making you believe you have “gone out to see the world,” when in fact you are merely circling within a larger information cage.
What it calls “danger” is often nothing more than freedom;what it calls “safety” is often the real risk.
The world is not as the CCP describes it—and what the CCP fears most is that you might go and see the real world for yourself.
When the Opposition Is Eliminated, the System No Longer Needs to Explain Itself
—Written after the Dissolution of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party
Abstract:
The dissolution of the Democratic Party in 2025 marks the institutional eradication of Hong Kong’s opposition. This was not an electoral defeat, but the outcome of political screening. With dissent eliminated, power no longer needs to explain itself, and the system moves toward fragility and enforced silence.
Author: Zhang Zhijun Editor: Li Congling Executive Editor: Zhong Ran Proofreader: Wang Bin Translator: Liu Fang
On December 14, 2025, Hong Kong’s Democratic Party announced its dissolution.
In any normal political system, the existence of an opposition has never been a threat. On the contrary, it is a form of proof—proof that power still recognizes its own limits, that the system still believes in debate, and that governance remains willing to be questioned, supervised, and corrected. When a regime no longer allows an opposition to exist, it is expressing only one thing: it no longer needs to be explained.
The role of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party was never to overthrow the order. What it did was simply to remind that the order still needed to respond to the people.
On December 14, this political party—founded more than thirty years ago and once the largest opposition force in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council—reached its end. According to Reuters, senior figures in the Democratic Party had been approached by Chinese officials or intermediaries and were explicitly told that failure to dissolve the party would result in severe consequences, including arrest. This was not the failure of political competition, but the completion of an institutional “clearance operation.”
Founded in 1994, the Democratic Party was born at a time when Hong Kong was still regarded as a place where the future could be discussed. For many years it served as the leading opposition force, advocating democratic reform and defending freedom, human rights, and the rule of law—terms that were once written into Hong Kong’s political language but have since become dangerous.
In 2020, the Democratic Party openly opposed the National Security Law. That same year, it helped plan a primary election on its own initiative. The outcome was not electoral defeat, but political retribution: then–party chairman Wu Chi-wai was arrested, and the opposition as a whole was treated as a “risk factor.”
In 2021, Beijing comprehensively reshaped Hong Kong’s electoral system, allowing only vetted “patriots” to run for office. The opposition was gradually expelled from the legislature—not because it lost votes, but because it lost the permission to exist. Politics ceased to be competition and became screening. The final outcome was not sudden.
In February 2025, the Democratic Party announced the initiation of dissolution procedures; in April, it authorized its central committee to handle dissolution and liquidation. December 14 was merely the final step in the system’s logic. A system that no longer allows an opposition to exist is not more stable, but more fragile.
Because the true function of an opposition has never been to seize power, but to remind power that it still needs to explain itself.
When the opposition is eliminated, power no longer needs to answer “why”; when the legislature is left with only one voice, errors lose their path to correction; when a system no longer tolerates dissent, society is left with only obedience and silence.
And silence does not equal consent. The dissolution of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party does not mean that the values it once represented have disappeared. It only means that these values can no longer be expressed in open politics. In a system that remains confident, the opposition is tolerated; in a system that has lost its sense of security, the opposition must be destroyed.
History will remember not merely the end of a political party, but when and how a city was stripped of its right to say “no.” When the opposition no longer exists, the question is never “who won,” but whether this system has already decided that it will no longer answer to anyone at all.
Abstract:This article aims to explore the deep political logic behind the Chinese government’s high level of vigilance toward grassroots charitable organizations (NGOs), analyzing its fear of “governing legitimacy” and “social mobilization capacity.”
In the biting cold wind, children in remote areas wear tattered thin clothes, still with summer sandals on their feet, their small hands cracked open by the freezing cold. This is a heart-piercing image that many Chinese people have seen. In 2015, in Bijie, Guizhou, four left-behind children who had long lacked care and protection from the cold died in a dilapidated house. This incident briefly shocked the entire country but was quickly sealed off by public opinion. In any normal civilized society, such a tragedy would trigger an overwhelming wave of grassroots assistance. However, in China, the warm hands reaching out to these children are always locked by cold handcuffs called “political security.”
Isn’t this strange? How can a regime that possesses nuclear weapons and a massive stability-maintenance apparatus be afraid of a few padded jackets, several boxes of milk, and kind-hearted people running around remote poor areas? In 2018, when several volunteers raised winter supplies for children in pastoral areas in Gansu and Qinghai, they were summoned for talks on the grounds of “conducting activities without approval.” Some supplies were confiscated, and those involved were warned not to organize similar donations again.
Now, let us slowly peel back the core like peeling an onion.
First, the helpers are guilty: people’s kindness has crossed the boundary of power.
Under totalitarian logic, goodness is not a universal value, but a licensed franchise. This may sound absurd, but there are many examples. Take the Liren Library as one example. The grassroots organization “Liren,” which once attempted to establish libraries in rural areas and awaken public consciousness, built dozens of village reading rooms in Yunnan, Guizhou, and other regions. Yet it was deemed to pose “ideological risks.” Its leaders were repeatedly summoned for talks, projects were completely halted, books were sealed, and volunteer networks were forcibly dismantled. What the government fears is not those books, but the possibility that children might gain the ability to think in addition to receiving padded clothing.
Another example is Angel Moms. For many years, countless unofficial orphanages have been forcibly shut down. Some volunteers who rescued sick children and abandoned infants across provinces were investigated on charges such as “illegal social organizations” and “disrupting social management order,” and rescue channels were forcibly cut off. The authorities would rather let children waste away helplessly behind broken windows of welfare institutions than allow grassroots groups like Angel Moms to display compassion that goes beyond the system. Since the promulgation of the Law on the Management of Domestic Activities of Overseas Non-Governmental Organizations in 2016, countless labor, gender, and education NGOs that worked deeply at the grassroots level and spoke for vulnerable groups have been labeled as “foreign infiltration” and uprooted entirely. In cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, a large number of grassroots public-interest projects were forced to deregister, and their leaders were restricted from leaving the country or placed under long-term surveillance.
These cases repeatedly prove that, in the eyes of the CCP authorities, an uncontrolled helper is far more dangerous than a freezing child.
Second comes the logic of dictators: they would rather maintain “absolute control” than allow “society to save itself.” The Chinese government’s rejection of grassroots charity stems from three deep-seated fears embedded in its very bones.
The first fear is the germination of “organization.” What authoritarian regimes fear most is the emergence of horizontal connections among the populace. Charitable activities naturally possess mobilizing and cohesive power, enabling strangers to unite around a common goal. During the Henan floods in 2021, some grassroots rescue teams not affiliated with the official system were barred from entering disaster areas for refusing to accept unified command, while images of delayed rescue scenes were quickly erased. For a regime that promotes an “atomized society,” any social bond that bypasses grassroots Party organizations constitutes a direct threat to its ruling power.
The second fear is the loss of “legitimacy.” The CCP has long emphasized that only the Communist Party is the source of happiness. If grassroots organizations perform more quickly, more transparently, and with greater humanitarian concern than the government in the face of disasters and poverty, the public will inevitably ask: “If civil society can do better, what use is this bloated and corrupt bureaucratic system?” In multiple disasters, grassroots volunteers released real-time rescue and supply information through social media, only to be ordered to delete the content, while official announcements often appeared days later. In order to conceal incompetence, excellence must be strangled.
The third fear, and the most hypocritical one, is fear of the truth. Every child who requires grassroots assistance is a silent indictment of the lies of “national rejuvenation” and “comprehensive poverty alleviation.” Grassroots charity inevitably involves field investigation and information dissemination, which pierces the illusion of prosperity woven by state media. Similar logic was repeatedly verified in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic: grassroots records and calls for help were swiftly deleted, yet the problems themselves did not disappear. Thus, they took action—covering the mouths of the suffering while severing the hands of the helpers.
Once the onion is fully peeled, one can stand atop the high walls and look down upon how bitter the winter beneath this power truly is. Charity has been absorbed into a “bureaucratic Red Cross”-style arena of power rent-seeking. When compassion must pass through layers of political vetting before reaching the grassroots, such a system has completely lost its capacity for self-repair. It is not merely rejecting outside help; it is suffocating the moral vitality and compassion of the entire nation.
In the ice and snow, children still shiver, while the regime that claims to serve the people hides behind high walls, vigilantly staring at every padded jacket and every book that attempts to be passed over the wall. This fear of warmth is precisely the clearest proof of the Communist Party’s profound inner weakness and terror.
