by Zhou Yaxin
In the winter of 1943, at the Xi'an Coal Mine in what was then the Japanese puppet regime of "Manchukuo" in China's northeast, a miner named Li Xingyu submitted a leave application.
Written in simple, broken words, the slip reads: "My name is Li Xingyu. My three sons are all dead. I am heartbroken ... My mother is over seventy and blind ... I have nowhere else to turn. I beg the director to have mercy and give me a certificate so that I may return home to visit my mother. I worked shifts with my sons, never missing a single day ... Of my five children, four are dead. I have no heart left to work ..."
This leave application was never approved.
Today, it is preserved at the Exhibition Hall of the Liaoyuan Miners' Tomb from the Period of Japanese Occupation in Northeast China. Also on display are the largely intact remains of 197 miners, along with more than 20 sets of scattered remains. Some skulls bear knife marks, and some leg bones are severed. The youngest victim was merely 12 years old. A local ballad from the era captured the horror: "Electric fences stretch high, watchtowers stand tall; miners are locked up like prisoners in a cell. Entering the mine was like stepping through hell's gate; to stay alive was harder than death itself."
These are stark reminders of the colonial expansion and resource plundering carried out by Japanese militarism in northeast China, deeply rooted in history and etched in memories that remain searing to this day.
After the Meiji Restoration, Japan embarked on a path of military expansion in Asia. China's northeast, with its abundant resources and unique geostrategic position, became a primary target.
On Sept. 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army deliberately staged the September 18th Incident. Within less than half a year, China's three northeastern provinces fell under Japanese occupation.
The crimes committed by Japanese militarism during its 14-year colonial rule in the region will never be forgotten. The lie of "benevolent colonialism" repeatedly peddled by Japan's right wing will collapse under its own weight.
Plundering resources and monopolizing the economy -- Japan pursued a colonial economic model of "Japan being the industrial hub and China's northeast the raw material base." It set up over 200 entities, including major railway, power and coal companies, and used them to seize control of northeast China's economic lifelines. According to incomplete statistics, between 1932 and 1945, Japan extracted 223 million tons of coal and 120 million tons of grain, along with other resources, from northeast China to fuel its war machine. Japan also profited enormously from opium smuggling in the region.
Enslaving education and colonial indoctrination -- The Japanese invaders adhered to the principle that "To subjugate a nation, first erase its history." After the establishment of the puppet "Manchukuo" in 1932, Japan started to replace Chinese language with Japanese in schools, attempting to make Chinese children forget their own history and identity. The puppet regime revised middle school textbooks, removing content on traditional Chinese culture and history to promote the narrative that "Manchukuo" was an "independent state."
Brutal exploitation and disregard for human life -- Across coal mines, the Japanese military enforced a policy that treated human lives as expendable in the pursuit of coal. Countless laborers starved, died from disease, were beaten to death or burned alive in mines where basic safety measures were virtually nonexistent. According to the Japanese puppet regime's coal production cost data, Chinese laborers were listed alongside explosives and detonators, treated as little more than inputs in the production process.
During the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Japan forcibly recruited over 10 million Chinese laborers across the country. In northeast China alone, 2 million died from abuse. Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army built the world's largest germ warfare base in Harbin, where it experimented on imprisoned civilians and prisoners of war -- subjecting them to frostbite, poison gas and low-pressure tests, and deliberately infecting them with plague, anthrax and cholera. During Japan's invasion of China, an estimated 650,000 Chinese died as a result of Japanese biological warfare.
Yet even today, some right-wing forces in Japan not only refuse to reflect on their history of colonial aggression, but also deliberately distort historical facts.
They portray the war of aggression as an effort to "liberate Asia from Western colonial rule," and claim that Japan accelerated the "modernization" of some Asian countries and regions through infrastructure construction and "good governance" during its colonial rule.
The historical record tells a different story.
The infrastructure built by Japan in occupied territories was designed primarily to serve its own war needs. The systematic extraction of resources and the atrocities committed under Japanese militarism left local people in abject poverty, severely disrupted the economic and social development of Asian nations, and impeded the progress of colonized countries. The so-called "good governance" practices are in fact evidence of crimes, scars of suffering, and engines of death. The much-vaunted "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was in reality a "Greater East Asia Aggression Sphere." Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians died under Japanese militarism -- hardly a record of "co-prosperity."
Ninety-five years on, some right-wing forces in Japan still show no remorse or repentance for the September 18th Incident. They even attempt to tamper with historical facts and whitewash their record, seeking to turn the page on all their crimes of aggression and colonization in Asia. The Chinese people will never accept this, nor will the peoples of other Asian countries that suffered Japanese aggression.
History cannot be falsified. Conscience and justice will endure. Miner Li Xingyu's leave application is an irrefutable evidence, as are the miners' remains on display and the records left behind by the puppet regime.
The alarm bell of the September 18th continues to ring -- not to perpetuate hatred, but to ensure that these pieces of evidence are seen, remembered and passed on from one generation to the next.
As long as these records endure, the historical truth will endure, and the Japanese right wing's plot to peddle the myth of "benevolent colonialism" will never succeed.
Editor's note: The author is an international affairs observer.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Xinhua News Agency.
