Complicity and Cold War Politics: The Long Shadow of Unit 731 in Sino-US Relations

Traumatic memories of the horrific human experimentation undertaken by the Japanese military at Unit 731 during World War II persist in China to this day. However, not only Japan is implicated in this sordid history – so is the United States. In short, after the end of World War II, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan decided to pardon the scientists involved in exchange for their research data. Moreover, China claims that the US utilized this ill-concocted data to subsequently develop weapons of biological warfare that were utilized by the US military against Chinese soldiers during the Korean War. This paper examines how memories of Unit 731 and its implications for alleged US military atrocities during the Korean War were not only utilized for anti-American propaganda during the “War to Resist America and Aid Korea,” but continue to be employed for anti-American sentiment in the 21st century People’s Republic of China (PRC). It suggests that the historical memory of Unit 731 in China is critical for shaping Chinese public perceptions of the US today. Moreover, it argues that China’s “century of humiliation” narrative is strategically employed by the CCP to portray Chinese victimization at the hands of foreign imperialism through the Korean War (1953). Lastly, it builds on scholarship from Barak Kushner, Andrew Levidis, and others to demonstrate the false dichotomy of World War II versus the “postwar” in East Asia - on the contrary, the tentacles of Japanese empire remained entangled in Cold War politics for both the early years of the PRC and the “postwar” rebuilding of Japan by the United States.