The Rape of Nanking: Massacre or Myth?
By Jonas E. Alexis • Unz Review • May 21, 2026
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang was unquestionably an incendiary and highly tendentious work that quickly generated considerable controversy in both the United States and Japan following its publication in 1997. The book received praise from major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The book achieved such remarkable success that it prompted then fifty-year-old Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, to produce the documentary film Nanking, which he described as a “labor of love.”[1] According to Ted Leonsis, the film was intended to be comparable to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.[2]
Chang, who was Chinese American, was only twenty-seven years old when she began writing The Rape of Nanking. However, Chang died by suicide in 2004 near Los Gatos at the age of thirty-six.[3] Before taking her own life in her automobile, Chang left three suicide notes, one of which stated in part:
“I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.”[4]
Whether Iris Chang’s fears were intensified by the medications she was taking, or whether she genuinely believed that certain organizations were pursuing her, lies beyond the scope of the present analysis. Her references to groups such as the CIA raise additional questions regarding the nature and origin of those concerns.
In any event, what remains undeniable is that Iris Chang’s book helped revive widespread public discussion of the so-called Nanjing Massacre. In a 1998 review of the work, George Will of the The Washington Post declared that: “it has stimulated seminars and conferences at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and many other places, and is assisting those honorable Japanese who are combatting their country’s officially enforced amnesia regarding what the Imperial Army did in December 1937 and January 1938.”[5]
In the same article, Will agreed with Chang’s position and declared that
“Japanese soldiers killed tens of thousands of surrendered Chinese soldiers and almost certainly more than 300,000 noncombatants. (Civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled 210,000. Britain and France suffered a combined total of 169,000 civilian deaths from 1939 to 1945.) The Nanking killing continued for seven weeks in front of international witnesses, without any attempt at concealment, and with the sadism of recreational killing. Chinese were used for bayonet practice and beheading contests. People were roasted alive, hanged by their tongues from hooks, mutilated, drowned in icy ponds, buried up to their waists and then torn apart by German shepherds, buried up to their necks and run over by horses or tanks. In addition to pandemic rape by Japanese soldiers even of young children, some of them tied to beds or posts for days, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, sons their mothers.”[6]
According to these accounts, the alleged atrocities occurred within a period of less than two months. The implicit assumption, therefore, is that Japanese soldiers were killing approximately 5,000 civilians each day! An obituary published in the New York Times similarly stated that “in less than two months they [the Japanese] murdered more than 300,000 civilians and raped more than 80,000 women.”[7] Chang placed the estimated number of rape victims between 20,000 and 80,000, rather than “more than 80,000.” Chang wrote:
“Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified.”[8]
Such an extraordinary claim would appear to require equally extraordinary evidence, thereby prompting several preliminary questions. Why did Mao Zedong— who had Jews fighting for him[9] and who later presided over policies that allegedly resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese citizens[10]—not make substantial use of this alleged evidence against Japan? Why did he never publicly suggest that Japanese soldiers were raping more than 1,300 women per day during the events in question? Is it being suggested that Mao was entirely unaware of such allegations, or that he failed to recognize their potential political significance?
Why did Chiang Kai-shek—who received support from both the Soviet Union and anti-Japanese propagandists such as Morris Cohen and Harold Isaacs in the United States—fail to address these allegations in any substantial manner? Moreover, if Harold Isaacs was deeply sympathetic to revolutionary movements in Asia and maintained associations with figures connected to Leon Trotsky, why did he not emphasize these claims more prominently in his own political and journalistic work?[11] One may ask whether Chang exaggerated certain aspects of the events in question or incorporated claims that were insufficiently substantiated or even fabricated, whether deliberately or unintentionally.
At this point, it is important to note that the book cannot be taken seriously, largely because her book omits many of the issues and questions raised above. Moreover, unlike historians such as David Irving, whose works are often grounded extensively in archival research, Chang’s book relies heavily on secondary sources rather than primary archival documentation. Furthermore, unlike detailed historical studies such as Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War by R. M. Douglas, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military by Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s War by David Irving, or After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh,[12] Chang’s ambitious work is not primarily based on extensive archival materials or a substantial body of primary-source evidence. This is not to suggest that there is anything inherently problematic about the use of secondary sources. Rather, the concern is that many of the sources upon which Chang relied contain their own uncertainties, ambiguities, or expressions of skepticism.
In all honesty, assessing Chang’s The Rape of Nanking is almost like scrutinizing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a fraudulent book which was quickly denounced for its historical inaccuracies, methodological weaknesses, and a lack of balance. Hitler’s Willing Executioners is indeed filled with citations, but they were largely distortions of the actual facts.
In fact, Goldhagen made things up whenever possible in order to prove the preposterous thesis that ordinary Germans were responsible for what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. When scholars exposed his clear errors and deliberate deceptions, Goldhagen did not apologize. Instead, he wanted to sue those scholars—a response that is completely contrary to genuine scholarship and historical research.[13] Of course, the Holocaust establishment had an interest in promoting Goldhagen’s threadbare hoax. Like Goldhagen’s book, the American establishment also almost certainly had an interest in promoting Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. After all, didn’t Japan attack Pearl Harbor? Didn’t Japan ally itself with Germany? Wasn’t Japan considered one of the villains of the war?
What is especially striking about this controversial debate is that Chang deliberately left out important issues from her book—issues that would have seriously weakened her thesis. For example, she never mentioned the Tongzhou Incident, which took place in the same year as the alleged Nanking Massacre.. In July 29, 1937, a group of some 3,000 Chinese soldiers ambushed Japanese garrison’s barracks
“and proceeded to raid Japanese shops, inns, and private homes. Approximately 200 of the 380 Japanese residents of Tongzhou were slaughtered. The 120 who survived did so only because they fled to the barracks, seeking refuge, before they were surrounded. These acts were flagrant violations of international law relating to the conduct of war (hereafter referred to as ‘international law’). Four days after the incident, the aforementioned director officially condemned the Chinese troops for the abduction, rape, and slaughter of Japanese citizens. Defense attorneys submitted his statement to the Tokyo Trials, but it was rejected by William Webb, the presiding justice, without explanation. The Allies were unwilling to allow any mention of the Tongzhou Massacre in the courtroom.”[14]
In April of 1947,
“defense attorney Levine called Kayashima Takashi (a former lieutenant-general in the Japanese Army) to the witness stand.” Takashi testified that the Chinese were committed brutal acts of rape and murder. His soldiers were called to Tongzhou in order to rescue the Japanese settlers. His accounts obviously make one wonders why Chang completely dismissed the entire incident in her book: The scene inside the town was ghastly. Brutally murdered bodies of Japanese settlers were lying everywhere. Most of them had ropes tied around their necks. I had to force myself to look at the mutilated corpses of women and innocent children. I no longer have the report I wrote at the time. I have relied on my memories for this statement. But I assure you that what I witnessed was so horrifying that I will never be able to forget it.
“I went to a restaurant (I think it was called Asahiken) to investigate. There were seven or eight women there, ranging in age from 17 or 18 to 40. They had all been raped, and then shot to death as they lay naked on the floor. Four or five of them had been stabbed in the genitals with bayonets. … The living quarters had been ransacked, and all the furniture, bedding, and clothing stolen. The situation was virtually the same at the homes of the other Japanese victims. The scene at the Kinsuiro Inn was gruesome. Since many of the Japanese had gathered there, sensing danger, there had been mass carnage. … The owner of Kinsuiro and the maids had been tied together, raped, and decapitated.”[15]
Similar incidents also took place in places such as Tanggu and Tianjin. The Japanese made several attempts to resolve the conflict peacefully, but those efforts failed. In fact, a peace conference between the Japanese and the Chinese was scheduled in Shanghai for August 9, but it never took place because soldiers from the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps killed Navy Sublieutenant Oyama Isao and First Class Seaman Saito Yozo on that very day.[16]
Edouard Helsey, China’s correspondent for a Paris newspaper, wrote in 1938:
“An unfortunate incident occurred on August 9, in which a Japanese naval officer was murdered by Chinese sentinels from the Rainbow (Hong) Bridge Airfield. Perhaps the Japanese officer should have been more cautious, but there is no denying that this was a Chinese plot. It is clear that the Nanking government had decided to go to battle in Shanghai at least 15 days prior to this incident. Their plan was not simply to split the Japanese forces in South China, but also to entice them into the Neutral Zone, which act would certainly cause international problems. It was a malicious trick, this engineering of incident upon incident, the misinterpretation of which would sway public opinion in the West.
“Chiang Kai-shek himself concurred that that was his intention, and he seemed rather pleased with himself. When I met with him at the end of October (1937) in Nanking, I asked him the following question. ‘That was a clever ploy, since Shanghai is a thorn in Japan’s side. Until it is extracted, the Japanese will be paralyzed, will they not?’ Chiang replied, through an interpreter: ‘You are right. I believe it was successful.’ At that time, the Japanese government and military authorities were attempting to avoid a war. They viewed an attack on Shanghai as a real danger.”[17]
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, about 22,000 Japanese living around the Yangtze River evacuated to Shanghai. It was agreed that the Japanese government had the right to protect those citizens in that area. At the same time, many foreigners from the United States, Britain, France, and Italy were also living in Shanghai. Because of the Boxer Rebellion around 1900, these governments had signed agreements with China that explicitly gave them the right to protect their citizens in Shanghai. So by August 11,
“Japan dispatched a naval landing party of 4,000 to Shanghai, to protect the lives and property of Japanese citizens. But by then, the Chinese force, shielded by pillboxes and creeks, had already swelled to 150,000. Therefore, the Japanese government decided to send two more divisions from Japan to Shanghai on August 13. On the night of August 14, five days after Sublieutenant Oyama was assassinated, as hostilities and tension heightened, Chinese Air Force planes bombed Shanghai. Several aircraft flew toward Shanghai at 10:00 a.m., and dropped bombs on the Japanese Consulate, Naval Landing Force Headquarters, Japanese warships, and on the streets of Shanghai. At about 4:00 p.m., a dozen aircraft bombed the moored warship Izumo, the French Settlement, and the International Settlement. An entry in The China Year Book 1938 reads ‘Chinese planes drop bombs in International Settlement.’ Those bombs killed 1,741 persons and wounded 1,868. Most of the victims were Chinese. The Chinese Air Force had intentionally dropped bombs on its own people, setting a world record, however disgraceful.”[18]
All of these historical backgrounds were completely omitted from Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Chang claimed that Nanking’s population was around 600,000 when the city fell, but independent estimates place the population closer to 200,000 to 250,000. “The population did not reach 600,000 until June 1940, 30 months after the Japanese occupied the city.”[19]
It gets more interesting. As historian Higashinakano Shudo convincingly puts it,
“If 300,000 were indeed massacred over a period of two months, then 5,000 people would have been killed each day, at a rate of three or four per minute, for a period of 60 days… The total area of the Safety Zone was only 3.86 square kilometers. If, in such a small space, 100,000, or 300,000, individuals were massacred, there would have been corpses everywhere.”[20]
If Chang’s claims are incorrect, then what is the historical truth behind the debate? Is it historically accurate to say that the Japanese mercilessly tortured and massacred more than 300,000 noncombatants and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women? What would the Japanese military have gained from such actions? And is it reasonable to believe that the international community knew these events were taking place and did nothing?
Japanese historian Shudo Higashinakano wrote in his documented work The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction that Chang’s book “relies on faked photographs and hugely exaggerated accounts.”[21]
Higashinakano also sent Penguin, the publisher of The Rape of Nanking, a list of no fewer than ninety historical errors found in just the first sixty pages of the book. Penguin eventually corrected some of those errors.[22]
Higashinakano was not the only historian to point out factual errors in Chang’s book. Shortly after the book was published, Ikuhiko Hata, one of Japan’s leading historians, wrote a lengthy article highlighting what he described as serious deceptions involving at least eleven photographs used in the book. I also had the opportunity to receive Hata’s book on comfort women in South Korea through one of his university associates. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it one year after Chang’s book was published:
“One photo, which the book credits to the military Politburo of the Chinese Nationalist government, shows women and children walking across a bridge with Japanese soldiers, and carries the caption: ‘The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution.’ “The truth is, Hata said, that, although the photo was published with a similar caption by the Chinese Nationalists in 1938, apparently as anti-Japanese propaganda, it originally appeared the previous year as one of four in a Japanese newspaper, Asahi Gurafu, showing peaceful scenes of Chinese villagers under Japanese occupation, with women and children returning home from the fields.
“In the sharper original photo, it is possible to see that two of the villagers are smiling, and there is a woman pulling a cart of freshly harvested cotton that was cropped out of the Nationalist Chinese version. The cropped photo appeared in a recent book on Nanjing by a Japanese professor as an illustration of Japanese army atrocities in China. But after its interpretation was challenged, the publisher of his book apologized and retracted it.
“Other mistakes occur in Chang’s book, which quotes as ‘compelling evidence’ a secret telegram by Japan’s foreign minister admitting that Japanese troops, ‘in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns,’ had slaughtered ‘not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians.’ This was, in fact, a quotation from the cable of a British reporter, and concerned deaths not only in Nanjing but elsewhere. The book also describes Japan as the first nation to use air power ‘as a means of terrorizing civilian populations,’ a distinction generally attributed to the Germans in World War I.”[23]
Chang’s thesis is now beginning to fall apart. Historian David M. Kennedy of Stanford noticed similar problems. Although Kennedy praised the book, especially for its many photographs—likely unaware that critics had challenged the authenticity of several of them—he still stated that the book contains “intellectually insufficient” assertions.[24] In a similar vein, historian Roger B. Jeans of Washington and Lee University declared that Chang’s book is “half-baked history.”
Chang, said Jeans, was “greatly inflating the population of Nanjing (Nanking) at that time and uncritically accepting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and contemporary Chinese figures for the numbers of Chinese civilians and soldiers killed.”[25] Historian Timothy M. Kelly put the final nail in the coffin. When academics and the media were praising Chang’s book, Kelly wrote:
“In light of the discrepancies I found in Chang’s book, it makes me wonder whether any of the reviewers know enough about the subject (Chinese and Japanese history, WWII, war crimes, historiography, not to mention the pertinent scholarly literature) to venture an informed opinion about the merits of Chang’s book… The mass media and those who write for it are often incredibly irresponsible and they need to be told so.”[26]
Kelly argued that the problem with the book can be placed in four categories: “simple carelessness, sheer sloppiness, historical inaccuracies, and shameless plagiarism.”[27]
Kelly provided multiple examples to support his accusations—far too many to discuss in full here. We will mention only a few of them. On page 166 of her book, Chang writes: “The Westerners themselves were often sprayed with Lysol upon entering the city.” Kelly responded,
“It’s incredulous that Chang would use a brand name here. Does she expect her readers to believe that Japanese authorities really sprayed foreigners with the particular product called Lysol? Surely the generic word ‘disinfectant’ would have been more adequate, not to mention accurate.”[28]
On page 13, Chang says: “In the documentary In the Name of the Emperor, one Japanese historian dismisses the entire Rape of Nanking with these words: ‘Even if twenty or thirty people had been killed, it would have been a great shock to Japan.” Kelly responded: “Chang does not identify this historian here or in the Notes section. Who is this historian? Is he/she a major or minor player? What impact has this historian had?”[29]
Chang: “When Shanghai finally fell in November, the mood of the imperial troops had turned ugly, and many, it was said, lusted for revenge as they marched toward Nanking.” Kelly: “Chang does not document the source of this statement, that is, who said it. This rhetorical device only gives the appearance that Chang is reporting fact.”[30]
Chang: “In July 1853, he (Matthew Perry) sent two ships belching black smoke into Tokyo Bay — giving the people of Japan their first glimpse of metal-clad, steam-powered ships. Surrounding himself with some sixty to seventy aggressive-looking men armed with swords and pistols, Perry strode through the capital of the Shogun and demanded meetings with the highest-ranking officials in Japan.”
Kelly: “The capital Chang refers to here is Edo, the present-day Tokyo. The historical truth is that Perry never set foot in the capital. He was officially, though reluctantly received, after some delay, on the beach at Uraga, some 35 miles from Edo at the entrance to Edo Bay, which has since been renamed Tokyo Bay. At the completion of the ceremonies Perry ordered his fleet of four vessels to a new anchorage about ten miles into the Edo Bay. He later proceeded in the Mississippi further into the bay to a point where he could see the Shinagawa area of Edo.”[31]
Chang: “In March 1944, the United Nations created the Investigation of War Crimes Committee …” Kelly: “How is this possible? The United Nations was not chartered until October 24, 1945. Chang again has her facts wrong.”
Once again, that is only the tip of the iceberg. If you believe Chang’s book is accurate, Kelly’s detailed research will likely come as a major shock. Even historian Takashi Yoshida Western Michigan University, who does not support the Japanese revisionist interpretation of what happened in Nanking, admits that Chang’s book contains “numerous errors and inaccuracies.”[32]
Even if we grant Chang’s questionable thesis that The Rape of Nanking is somehow accurate, it still would not fit with what the Allies actually did to Japan after World War II. Chang never discussed the fact that the Allied forces—especially the United States—committed sexual crimes and abuses, including the rape of many Japanese civilians, after the war. She called on Japan to apologize and pay reparations, yet she said nothing about what the United States did to Japan after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Moreover, Chang never discussed reports that some Chinese soldiers raped Chinese women and then blamed the crimes on Japanese soldiers. Even The New York Times—hardly a Japanese propaganda outlet—published an article in 1938 titled, “Ex-Chinese Officers Among U.S. Refugees: Colonel and His Aides Admit Blaming the Japanese for Crimes in Nanking.” It stated:
“The ex-Chinese officers in the presence of Americans and other foreigners confessed looting in Nanking and also that one night they dragged girls from the refugee camp into the darkness and the next day blamed Japanese soldiers for the attacks.”[33]
When the American professors who had protected those former Chinese officers realized that the officers themselves were involved in wrongdoing, they became “seriously embarrassed.”[34]
Chang mentioned none of these. Shudo argues:
“20 days before and immediately prior to the fall of Nanking, the city’s population was 200,000, according to Europeans and Americans who were there at the time. Eight days after the fall and on Christmas Eve, it was still 200,000. No one indicated a vast decrease in population due to mass slaughter. Confronted by these facts, how can anyone claim that 300,000 noncombatants were murdered in Nanking?
“Prior to the capture of the city, Chinese troops stripped off their uniforms and mingled with the civilian population. By doing so, they became unlawful combatants not protected by the Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Hague Convention. No Chinese military personnel inside the city walls surrendered to the Japanese. Accordingly, during the 11-year period spanning December 13, 1937, the day Nanking fell, to December 1948, when the Tokyo Trials ended, no one accused Japanese troops of having killed prisoners of war in violation of the aforementioned regulations. Confronted with these facts, how can anyone claim that the Japanese murdered prisoners of war?
“The Japanese are accused of having murdered 7,000 persons each day, i.e., 300,000 persons over a period of six weeks. But according to ‘Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians,’ the only killing witnessed by a European or American in Nanking was one ‘lawful execution.’ The contents of these reports (issued on a daily basis and submitted to the Japanese Embassy in Nanking) are corroborated by data gathered from the testimonies of European, American and Chinese residents in Nanking, and from Japanese military records (all of which data has been computerized and analyzed). How do we explain a massacre with no witnesses?”[35]
Harold Timperley, a British reporter for the Guardian, wrote the book What War Means, which helped spread the claim that Japanese forces were frequently killing civilians. However, the book itself did not provide documented evidence to support those accusations. Shudo continued:
“Rev. Miner Searle Bates and George Fitch submitted material for What War Means (both used pseudonyms). The ostensible intent of the book, edited by Timperley, was to impress upon the reader the horrors of war via accounts written by disinterested parties (European and American residents of Nanking). But Timperley was, in fact, an advisor to the Nationalist government’s Ministry of Information. Rev. Bates, a famous Christian missionary who taught at the University of Nanking, was also an advisor to the Ministry of Information. And Mrs. Fitch was a close friend of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek.
“It has also become clear that What War Means is a propaganda book compiled and published by the Counterintelligence Division of the Nationalist Ministry of Information’s International Propaganda Section. Timperley was paid by the Ministry of Information for editing the book. Thus, What War Means, perceived as proof of the ‘Nanking Massacre,’ was not written from an impartial standpoint. On the contrary, it can be viewed only as war propaganda.”[36]
As noted earlier, Chiang Kai-shek was aligned with Joseph Stalin in efforts to weaken or defeat Japan. In fact, scholar Li Yuzhen writes that Chiang made several attempts “to secure the direct participation of Soviet forces in China.” Yuzhen argues that Chiang’s cooperation with Stalin contributed significantly to Japan’s defeat during World War II.[37]
Both the Soviets and Chiang “were committed to defeat the Axis powers of Germany and Japan… War necessity compelled two men [Stalin and Chiang] who had every reason to distrust each other to overcome a long history of mutual suspicion and animosity to find common ground.”[38]
In other words, although Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin had their differences, they were united in their determination to defeat Japan and Germany. As Yuzhen puts it:
“As the threat of Japan to China increased, and that of Germany and Japan to the Soviet Union, China and the Soviet Union moved gingerly toward an accommodation. While Chiang hoped for Soviet material aid and actual Soviet military involvement in China’s war with Japan, Stalin’s strategy was to trap Japan in China so as to be able to concentrate on Europe and avoid a war with Japan on its eastern frontier. Stalin had the best cards, including a far more powerful army. He resisted China’s pressure to throw Soviet forces into China’s war with Japan until the last two weeks of the war.”[39]
It was Stalin himself who pressured the communist party in China to accept Chiang as their leader. “Soviet financial and military aid was instrumental in sustaining China’s war effort during the first five years of the war against Japan. Even though it is fair to say that the Soviets gained the most, the accommodation between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek paid dividends for both sides.”[40]
Anyone with a minimum level of intellectual honesty would acknowledge that it would have been in Chiang’s interest to promote the so-called Nanking massacre. Yet he never mentioned it. This suggests that the Nanking issue is far more complex than what has been portrayed by publications such as The New York Times and the Chicago Daily News. In addition, numerous key documents from the period of the alleged events in Nanking do not mention the incident either. In fact,
“the International Information Department (a branch of the Ministry of Information established not long before the fall of Nanking) sponsored 300 press conferences for foreign journalists between December 1, 1937 and October 24, 1938. During that time, emergency press conferences were called whenever important news broke (even in the dead of night, according to reports), and the news was transmitted all over the world. But no press conference was ever called to announce a massacre in Nanking.”[41]
So, the so-called rape of Nanking appears to have been shaped by wartime propaganda in the United States and possibly by Chinese authorities at the time. In the next articles, we will interview several Japanese writers and historians to hear their perspectives on this important issue.
Notes
[1] Thomas Heath, “Ted Leonsis Takes a Sharp Turn,” Washington Post, July 31, 2006.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Heidi Benson, “Historian Iris Chang won many battles / The war she lost raged within,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2005; Kathleen E. McLaughlin, “Iris Chang’s suicide stunned those she tried so hard to help,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 2004. The prevailing vision is that hate mail and threatening notes from Japanese ultranationalists may have contributed to her death. Implausible. First of all, the Chang family never told us who those “ultranationalists” were. The fact is that Chang’s book was widely criticized by Japanese academics for its lack of historical accuracy and intellectual honesty. Furthermore, Chang must have known that writing books like The Rape of Nanking was a huge enterprise which had the potential to create enormous controversy and historical debates. It sounds like she was not prepared to faced criticism and the complete historical inaccuracies in her book.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang .
[5] George Will, “Wartime Sadism: Nanking Remembered,” Washington Post, February 19, 1998.
[6] Ibid.
[7] “Iris Chang, Who Chronicled Rape of Nanking, Dies at 36,” NY Times, November 12, 2004.
[8] Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 6.
[9] Tom Segev, “The Jews Who Fought With Mao,” Haaretz, July 27, 2012.
[10] See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010).
[11] For a meticulous study on these issues, see Joshua Blakeney, Japan Bites Back: Documents Contextualizing Pearl Harbor (Non-Aligned Media, 2015).
[12] R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Brian Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2002); David Irving, Hitler’s War and the War Path (London: Focal Point Publications, 1991).
[13] See Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Verso, 1998).
[14] Shudo Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction (Minato-ku, Tokyo: Sekai Shuppan, Inc., 2005), 5.
[15] Ibid., 6.
[16] Ibid., 10.
[17] Ibid., 12.
[18] Ibid., 13.
[19] Ibid., 191
[20] Ibid., 150.
[21] Ibid., i.
[22] https://web.archive.org/web/20070705013557/http://www.jiyuu-shikan.org/nanjing/errors.html.
[23] Charles Burress, “Wars of Memory / When Iris Chang wrote ‘The Rape of Nanking,’ to memorialize one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in modern times, she wasn’t prepared for the firestorm she started,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 26, 1998.
[24] David M. Kennedy, “The Horror: Should the Japanese atrocities in Nanking be equated with the Nazi Holocaust?,” Atlantic, April 1998 issue.
[25] Roger B. Jeans, “Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan,” Journal of Military History, January 2005: 149-195.
[26] Timothy M. Kelly, “Book Review: The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang,” Edogawa Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyô no.15, March 2000: http://www1.edogawa-u.ac.jp/~tmkelly/research_review_nanking.html.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 146.
[33] Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre, 179.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., iii.
[37] Li Yuzhen, “Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin During World War II,” Hans van de Ven and Diana Lary, eds., Negotiating China’s Destiny in World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), chapter 8.
[38] Ibid., 142.
[39] Ibid., 141
[40] Ibid., 142.
[41] Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre, v.
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By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | May 15, 2026
The Beijing circus is over and Donald Trump’s talks with Xi Jinping produced nothing more than some pleasing photo ops and some performative diplomacy with no substantive accomplishments.
There was no final communique at the end of Trump’s two days of meetings with Xi Jinping. Instead, we are left to rely on the statements from each government. When you parse the two statements, the two readouts diverge significantly, and the gaps are as informative as the overlaps. When you compare what each side claims was discussed you can see what actually transpired at the summit.
The divergence between the two readouts is stark and strategically deliberate. Here is a precise accounting of what the White House emphasized that China’s Foreign Ministry either omitted entirely or mentioned only in the vaguest terms:
1. The Iran War and Nuclear Weapons — Omitted by China
This is the most consequential gap. The White House readout stated explicitly:
The two sides agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy. President Xi also made clear China’s opposition to the militarization of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use, and he expressed interest in purchasing more American oil to reduce China’s dependence on the Strait in the future. Both countries agreed that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”PBS
The Chinese readout, by contrast, merely said that “the two sides discussed the Middle East conflict” without offering any further details — no mention of the Strait, no mention of tolls, no mention of Iran’s nuclear program, and no acknowledgment of any agreed position on any of those issues. YouTube
This gap is enormous. The White House is asserting that China agreed Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and opposed Iran’s toll regime. That White House is spinning this as significant Chinese concessions that Beijing clearly did not want attributed to it publicly. However, according to a reliable source with access, Xi firmly rejected Trump’s request that China apply pressure on Iran and help open the Strait of Hormuz.
2. Fentanyl — Omitted by China
The White House readout specifically noted that the two sides discussed “addressing fentanyl precursor flows into the United States” — a longstanding US demand that China reduce the flow of chemical precursors used to manufacture fentanyl. The Chinese readout made no mention of fentanyl whatsoever, which is consistent with Beijing’s longstanding position that it has already done enough on the issue and resists framing it as a bilateral problem. Komo News
3. Agricultural Purchases — Omitted by China
The White House noted that the two presidents discussed “increasing Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural products.” China’s readout spoke only in general terms about trade being “mutually beneficial” and made no specific commitment to agricultural purchases. YouTube
4. Market Access for US Businesses — Framed Very Differently
The White House described the meeting as centered on “expanding market access for American businesses into China and increasing Chinese investment into US industries.” China’s readout framed this entirely differently — as China “opening its door wider” on its own terms, not as a response to US demands for market access.
5. The Business Delegation — Treated Asymmetrically
The White House noted that “leaders from many of the United States’ largest companies joined a portion of the meeting,” treating it as a substantive commercial engagement. The Chinese readout mentioned that Trump “asked each of the business leaders who were traveling with him to present themselves to President Xi” — framing it as a courtesy introduction rather than a substantive business discussion. YouTube
6. Taiwan — The Mirror Image Problem
The most telling asymmetry runs in the opposite direction on Taiwan. The White House readout did not mention Taiwan at all, while China centered its entire readout on Xi’s Taiwan warning. Trump declined to answer a reporter’s question about whether he and Xi had even discussed Taiwan. Rubio told NBC News that the US was “not asking for China’s help with Iran” — a comment that implicitly pushes back on what the White House readout seemed to suggest about Chinese cooperation. The National DeskBreitbart
The Bottom Line
Both sides released statements detailing what Trump and Xi discussed, but they only overlap in limited areas. The statements diverge most sharply on Iran — where the US claims specific Chinese commitments that China refused to acknowledge — and on Taiwan, where China made explicit warnings that the US declined to even mention. NPR
The pattern is diplomatically classic: each side published the readout that serves its domestic political needs and advances its negotiating position. China wanted the world to see Xi issuing stern warnings on Taiwan. Washington wanted the world to see China agreeing that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and opposing Iran’s toll regime. Whether either claimed concession is real — or merely asserted — is precisely what makes the readout divergence so revealing.
The Strategic Framework
Xi opened with a sweeping philosophical framing: “Transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe, and the international situation is fluid and turbulent.” He posed three questions to Trump directly: Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world? Can we build a bright future together for our bilateral relations? Wikipedia
Xi announced the two leaders had “agreed on a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability,” defining it precisely: “Constructive strategic stability means positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.” He said this framework “will provide strategic guidance for China-U.S. relations over the next three years and beyond” and stressed: “Building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability is not a slogan. It means actions in the same direction.” Wikipedia
Trade and Economics
Xi stated that “China-U.S. economic and trade ties are mutually beneficial and win-win in nature. Where disagreements and frictions exist, equal-footed consultation is the only right choice.” He said the economic and trade teams had “produced generally balanced and positive outcomes” at preparatory talks the prior day, and that “China will only open its door wider. U.S. businesses are deeply involved in China’s reform and opening up.” Wikipedia
Military and Diplomatic Channels
Xi called on the two sides to “make better use of communication channels in the political and diplomatic and military-to-military fields” and to “expand exchanges and cooperation in areas such as the economy and trade, health, agriculture, tourism, people-to-people ties and law enforcement.” Wikipedia
Taiwan — The Sharpest Language in the Readout
Xi was unambiguous: “The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations. If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy. ‘Taiwan independence’ and cross-Strait peace are as irreconcilable as fire and water. Safeguarding peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is the biggest common denominator between China and the U.S. The U.S. side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question.” Wikipedia
International Issues
The readout notes that the two presidents “exchanged views on major international and regional issues, such as the Middle East situation, the Ukraine crisis, and the Korean Peninsula” — but offered no further detail on any of those topics in the official Chinese text. Wikipedia
APEC and G20
The two presidents agreed to support each other in hosting a successful APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and G20 Summit this year. Wikipedia
Wang Yi’s Closing Assessment — May 15
Foreign Minister Wang Yi told state media: “This was an important meeting in which the two heads of state engaged in in-depth communication and achieved substantial outcomes,” calling it “a historical meeting.” He particularly touted progress on trade and economic issues. China’s Foreign Ministry also confirmed that President Xi Jinping will visit the United States this fall at the request of President Donald Trump.
As far as Iran is concerned, the Chinese and Russians are working behind the scenes — using Pakistan as a frontman — to erect a new security architecture for the Persian Gulf. The current effort is to convince Saudi Arabia and Qatar to effectively cut military ties with the US and enter into a strategic agreement that will be guaranteed by Russia and China. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar persist with prohibiting the US to use their bases and air space for a new set of attacks against Iran, the US may be compelled to call off planned strikes.
China’s position on Iran, Hormuz remains unchanged
Al Mayadeen | May 15, 2026
China moved on Friday to publicly reaffirm its longstanding position on Iran after speculation and conflicting reports circulated regarding Beijing’s stance during recent regional tensions, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry publishing a full statement outlining its official position.
Asian diplomatic sources told Al Mayadeen that Washington is expected to continue promoting claims that it succeeded in persuading Beijing to pressure Iran, particularly following recent US-China discussions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian nuclear file.
The sources said that the growing American rhetoric regarding “the Iranian nuclear issue” or claims of an agreement with Beijing on keeping the Strait of Hormuz open “without fees” are merely “attempts at media flooding and covering up the essence of the matter.”
China’s position on Iran clear, unchanged
The sources stressed that China’s position toward Iran “is clear and unchanged,” dismissing reports suggesting a shift in Beijing’s stance as false. They noted that China deliberately refrained from discussing Iran publicly during earlier talks before later issuing a full Foreign Ministry statement outlining its official position in detail.
Beijing continues to oppose the possession of nuclear weapons while simultaneously supporting Iran’s right to the peaceful use of uranium and civilian nuclear technology. China also maintains its longstanding position in favor of keeping the Strait of Hormuz open and preventing its militarization, while supporting Iran’s rights as a coastal state bordering the strategic waterway.
The sources added that “China buying oil or gas from the United States is nothing new because China diversifies its energy sources, but no one can replace Iranian oil or Hormuz energy imports, which constitute 45 percent of its energy needs.”
They further noted that China continues to support the creation of a joint regional security structure among Gulf states without outside interference, describing Beijing’s current “calm rhetoric” as an attempt to contain the “arrogance” of US President Donald Trump and his allies while creating conditions for a broader agreement through mutually beneficial economic incentives.
The sources noted that narratives suggesting a major Chinese shift against Iran are either inaccurate, deliberately misleading, or attempts to present recent diplomatic developments in the best possible light for Washington.
Trump, Xi, agree to address each other’s concerns
Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump held extensive discussions on bilateral and global issues and reached a series of new common understandings, China’s Foreign Ministry said Friday, as Beijing called for accelerated diplomacy between the United States and Iran.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said the two leaders agreed to address each other’s concerns and enhance communication and coordination on international and regional affairs, describing the talks as a step toward building a “constructive and stable strategic relationship” between China and the US.
Commenting on ongoing US-Iran negotiations, the Chinese Foreign Ministry stressed that a comprehensive and lasting ceasefire should be achieved “as soon as possible,” adding that a rapid resolution would benefit the United States, Iran, regional countries, and the broader international community.
“The war between Iran and the United States should not have erupted in the first place, and there is no need for it to continue,” the ministry said.
Beijing reiterated its longstanding position that dialogue and negotiations remain the best path forward, warning against military escalation and emphasizing that “a military solution is not the answer.”
“Now that the door to dialogue has been opened, it should not be closed again,” the ministry said, calling for efforts to consolidate momentum toward de-escalation. China also said it would continue working with the international community to provide greater support for peace talks between the US and Iran.
Trump Visits Beijing In a World Washington No Longer Controls
By Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute | May 14, 2026
When President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing yesterday for his summit with Xi Jinping, much of the American foreign policy establishment framed the meeting through the familiar lens of “great power competition.” Analysts will scrutinize every handshake, communiqué, and trade announcement for signs that Washington is either “standing up” to China or “conceding” ground to its principal rival.
But the more important reality is that the summit will likely underscore just how much the balance of leverage has shifted over the past several years—and how little appetite Beijing has for rescuing Washington from the consequences of its own strategic blunders.
The prevailing assumption in Washington remains that China is an aggressive revisionist power poised to overturn the international order through military expansion and economic coercion. Yet the actual picture is considerably more complicated. Beijing’s posture today looks less like that of a state eager for global confrontation and more like that of a rising commercial empire patiently exploiting American overextension.
That overextension is now impossible to ignore.
Washington’s latest entanglement in Iran has once again demonstrated the limits of American power projection. Years of interventionism, sanctions escalation, proxy commitments, and military signaling have produced precisely what critics of U.S. foreign policy long warned about: another unstable regional crisis with no clear off-ramp and no coherent strategic objective.
And notably, China has shown almost no interest in helping Washington navigate the mess.
Despite endless warnings from hawks that Beijing and Tehran are inseparable strategic partners, China’s actual behavior has been far more restrained and transactional. Beijing benefits from Iranian energy flows and prefers regional stability, but it has little reason to actively bail out an American foreign policy establishment that helped create the crisis in the first place. From Beijing’s perspective, every additional dollar and hour Washington spends bogged down in the Middle East is a dollar and hour not spent in East Asia.
That reality carries profound implications for Taiwan.
For years, American policymakers have insisted that Washington could effectively deter—or if necessary defeat—a Chinese effort to forcibly reunify Taiwan with the mainland. Yet recent events reveal how implausible that confidence increasingly appears. If the United States struggles to maintain readiness, logistics, and political cohesion while managing comparatively limited Middle Eastern operations thousands of miles from China, what exactly convinces anyone that it could successfully wage and sustain a high-intensity conflict directly off the Chinese coast?
The uncomfortable truth is that Beijing likely sees America’s Iran difficulties not as a warning, but as confirmation of long-standing Chinese assumptions about U.S. decline and strategic exhaustion.
China, meanwhile, has continued strengthening the areas that matter most in long-term competition: trade, industrial capacity, and monetary influence.
Over the past year especially, Beijing has deepened commercial ties throughout the Global South while accelerating efforts to denominate trade outside the dollar system. None of this means the dollar is about to collapse tomorrow, as breathless commentators sometimes claim. But it does mean that Washington’s ability to weaponize the global financial system is gradually eroding at the margins.
That erosion matters because American coercive power increasingly depends less on productive economic strength and more on financial leverage, sanctions architecture, and control of chokepoints. China understands this perfectly, which is why it has spent years systematically reducing vulnerabilities while building leverage of its own.
Perhaps nowhere is that leverage more obvious than in rare earths processing.
Washington often speaks as though China’s dominance in rare earth supply chains is merely an unfortunate market distortion that can easily be corrected with sufficient industrial policy. In reality, Beijing possesses something far more significant: a near-stranglehold on the processing infrastructure necessary to convert raw materials into usable industrial inputs for advanced manufacturing, electronics, defense systems, and green technologies.
This gives China a remarkably effective whip hand.
Even modest Chinese export restrictions over the past year have demonstrated how fragile Western supply chains remain. Despite years of rhetoric about “reshoring” and “de-risking,” the United States still lacks the capacity to rapidly replace China’s processing ecosystem. Building mines is difficult enough. Replicating decades of accumulated industrial infrastructure, refining expertise, environmental tolerance, and integrated supply chains is another matter entirely.
This reality may help explain why the Trump-Xi summit will likely focus less on ideological confrontation and more on managed coexistence.
Speculation about some form of institutionalized “Board of Trade” arrangement, floated by Michael Froman at the Council on Foreign Relations, may sound fanciful at first glance, but it fits the emerging logic of the relationship. Neither side appears genuinely interested in comprehensive economic decoupling because neither side can actually afford it. The likely trajectory instead is selective compartmentalization, with tariffs and controls in sectors deemed strategic, combined with continued deep integration elsewhere.
Ironically, such arrangements would represent a tacit admission that decades of maximalist rhetoric from Washington about fundamentally remaking China’s economic system have failed.
And that failure may be the central story to watch in Beijing.
For all the alarmism surrounding the so-called “China threat,” the summit may ultimately reveal something much simpler. Beijing increasingly believes time is on its side, while Washington appears trapped between military overextension abroad, industrial weakness at home, and a foreign policy establishment still struggling to distinguish genuine national interests from ideological crusades.
Trump may well secure commercial deals, soybean purchases, aircraft orders, or even the outline of some new trade-management framework—but beneath the symbolism and spectacle, the larger reality will remain unchanged.
China does not appear eager for war with the United States.
It simply appears increasingly confident that it can outlast it.
China rejects Israel’s ‘groundless’ allegation of missile support for Iran
Press TV – May 12, 2026
China has rejected Israel’s claims that Beijing provided support to Iran in manufacturing missiles.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told reporters on Tuesday that the accusations “are not grounded in facts.”
Beijing, he said, is “committed to promoting de-escalation and peace talks to bring about an end to the conflict” between Iran and the United States.
“We have made China’s position clear on multiple occasions. As a responsible major country, China always fulfills its due international obligations,” he added.
In an interview with CBS, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that during the joint US-Israeli aggression against Iran, China “gave a certain amount of support and particular components for missile manufacturing.”
Asked whether such support was continuing, he said, “Could be. Could be,” without providing further information.
Netanyahu’s controversial remarks came ahead of a planned visit to Beijing by US President Donald Trump.
The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman also condemned recent US sanctions on 12 individuals and entities over their alleged links to Iran, saying Beijing firmly opposes “unilateral sanctions.”
Guo said that the current “pressing priority” in West Asia is to “prevent, by all means, a relapse in fighting, rather than exploit the situation to throw mud at China.”
The US Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on 12 individuals and companies, several of them based in China and Hong Kong, for their alleged involvement in helping Iran “obtain weapons and the raw materials” necessary for its Shahed drones and ballistic missiles.
The department also threatened to take action against any foreign entities supporting what it called “illicit Iranian commerce,” including airlines, and to implement secondary sanctions on foreign financial institutions that assist Iran, even those connected to China’s independent oil refineries.
China, however, pushed back against the sanctions on Chinese refiners buying Iranian crude, invoking a “blocking rule” for the first time last week, directing companies not to comply with US sanctions.
Why did Washington impose sanctions on China before the Trump-Xi summit?
By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – May 12, 2026
New U.S. sanctions against Chinese companies just before Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing highlight the growing tendency to use economic pressure as a primary instrument of American diplomacy.
Donald Trump plans to visit China from May 13 to 15. His baggage includes a load of sanctions instead of concessions. Days before his visit to China, Washington imposed fresh sanctions on mainland Chinese and Hong Kong-linked firms accused of helping Iran procure drone and missile-related components. The message is unmistakable: the United States wants to negotiate from a position of pressure. But coercion before diplomacy often produces the opposite effect. Rather than strengthening Washington’s leverage over Beijing, the move risks hardening Chinese resistance, deepening China-Iran ties, and accelerating the erosion of America’s sanctions power in an increasingly multipolar world.
Coercion as Diplomacy
The timing tells the story. On May 8, the US Treasury announced sanctions on 10 individuals and companies — several based in China and Hong Kong — accused of facilitating Iran’s acquisition of materials used in Shahed drones and ballistic missile programmes. According to the Treasury Department, some firms allegedly supplied insulation materials and procurement services linked to Iran’s military-industrial network. Reuters reported that the sanctions came just days before Trump’s scheduled meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. And, just as Trump flew to China, the US imposed further sanctions on entities involved in shipping Iranian oil to China, hitting China’s energy demands.
The logic behind the move is relatively straightforward. Trump appears determined to avoid entering Beijing looking conciliatory or desperate for stabilization in US-China relations. He wants to completely dodge the impression that the US has lost in Iran. By imposing sanctions beforehand, Washington is signaling that dialogue with China will not come at the expense of American pressure campaigns against Iran or broader national security concerns. The sanctions also serve a domestic political purpose. Trump can portray himself as simultaneously engaging China diplomatically while remaining “tough” on both Beijing and Tehran.
This reflects a broader pattern in Trump-era diplomacy: negotiation through escalation. Whether on tariffs, NATO burden-sharing, or Iran, Trump has frequently relied on pressure tactics to create bargaining leverage before high-level meetings. The assumption is that economic coercion raises the costs of resistance and therefore increases the incentives for compromise. But this strategy works only if the other side believes accommodation is less costly than defiance. That assumption is becoming increasingly questionable in the case of China.
Beijing’s reaction was immediate and predictable. China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the sanctions as “illegal unilateral measures” and pledged to defend the legitimate interests of Chinese companies. Rather than creating diplomatic flexibility, the sanctions may have narrowed Xi Jinping’s room for maneuver by making concessions appear politically submissive.
This is an important point often overlooked in Washington. Chinese leaders do not interpret pre-summmit sanctions merely as tactical bargaining instruments; they typically view them as public demonstrations of coercion designed to humiliate China before negotiations even begin. In such circumstances, compromise becomes politically costly because it risks reinforcing perceptions of weakness both domestically and internationally. That dynamic is particularly significant today because US-China relations are no longer defined by strategic ambiguity or selective competition. They are increasingly viewed in both capitals as a systemic rivalry involving trade, technology, finance, security, and ideology simultaneously. In that environment, sanctions cease to look like isolated policy tools and instead become part of a broader containment strategy.
The Limits of Economic Pressure
The deeper problem for Washington is that sanctions may no longer carry the same coercive power they once supposedly did.
For decades, the United States relied on its dominance over the global financial system to compel compliance from adversaries and third parties alike. Access to the dollar system, Western banking networks, and US markets gave Washington enormous leverage. Secondary sanctions became, at least from Washington’s perspective, one of the most effective tools of American statecraft. But the geopolitical environment has changed significantly.
China today possesses far greater economic resilience than most previous sanctions targets. It also has stronger incentives to resist American pressure because compliance increasingly carries strategic costs of its own. Beijing sees Iran not merely as an isolated Middle Eastern partner but as part of a broader network of states capable of constraining US influence across multiple regions.
China remains Iran’s largest oil customer despite years of American sanctions. Under these conditions, China is unlikely to fully cooperate with Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran. Indeed, repeated sanctions may actually be accelerating China’s determination to build sanctions-resistant economic structures. Beijing has already expanded the use of alternative payment systems, encouraged yuan-denominated trade, and adopted legal mechanisms allowing Chinese firms to challenge or ignore certain foreign sanctions regimes. Each new round of American penalties reinforces the Chinese perception that dependence on US-controlled financial systems constitutes a strategic vulnerability.
There is also growing evidence that sanctions enforcement is producing diminishing returns. The United States has repeatedly sanctioned Chinese and Hong Kong-linked firms accused of helping Iran procure drone components over the past several years. Yet the procurement networks continue adapting through shell companies, intermediaries, and rerouted supply chains.
A 2025 report in the South China Morning Post described the process as a “whack-a-mole exercise,” noting how Iranian procurement networks rapidly reorganized after earlier sanctions targeted Hong Kong-based front companies. The persistence of these networks suggests that sanctions may disrupt transactions temporarily without fundamentally changing the underlying strategic calculations of either China or Iran.
This matters because coercive tools derive much of their effectiveness from credibility. If the targeted state concludes that sanctions are manageable, adaptable, or largely symbolic, then the deterrent value of future sanctions declines substantially.
A More Fragmented Geopolitical Order
The sanctions also reveal a broader contradiction in contemporary American foreign policy. Washington increasingly wants two incompatible outcomes at the same time: strategic competition with China and selective cooperation with China. The Trump administration appears to believe that it can compartmentalize the relationship — sanctioning Chinese entities over Iran while simultaneously seeking Chinese cooperation on trade, regional stability, or maritime security. But the relationship has become too securitized for neat compartmentalization.
From Beijing’s perspective, sanctions on Chinese firms are not disconnected technical measures. They are part of a larger American strategy aimed at constraining China’s economic and geopolitical rise. Under those conditions, even limited cooperation with Washington becomes politically sensitive inside China.
Ironically, the sanctions may therefore deepen exactly the alignment Washington seeks to weaken. China, Iran, and Russia increasingly share a common interest in reducing exposure to US-led financial and strategic pressure. They do not constitute a formal alliance, but they are moving toward greater coordination because American coercive policies create shared incentives for resistance.
This does not mean sanctions are entirely ineffective. They can still raise transaction costs, complicate procurement networks, and signal political resolve. But the era in which sanctions alone could fundamentally reshape the behavior of major powers may be fading.
The more important question now is whether Washington is adapting quickly enough to that reality. If the United States continues relying on sanctions as its primary instrument of geopolitical leverage, it may unintentionally accelerate the fragmentation of the very international order that once made those sanctions so powerful.
Trump may arrive in Beijing believing he has strengthened his negotiating hand. Yet Xi Jinping is likely to interpret the sanctions differently: not as leverage for compromise, but as evidence that Washington increasingly views pressure itself as diplomacy, and that coercion is likely to remain a key feature of US ties with China. And when coercion becomes the default language of international politics, major powers rarely move toward accommodation. They prepare instead for a world in which confrontation is permanent.
Salman Rafi Sheikh is aresearch analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
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China issues first prohibition order to safeguard international trade order under rule of law
People’s Daily | May 3, 2026
China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) on Saturday issued a prohibition order in accordance with Rules on Counteracting Unjustified Extraterritorial Application of Foreign Legislation and Other Measures (the 2021 Blocking Rules), which explicitly stated that China shall not recognize, enforce, or give effect to the unilateral sanctions imposed by the US, which listed five Chinese petrochemical enterprises on the Specially Designated Nationals List and imposed asset freezes and transaction bans on grounds of alleged oil transactions with Iran.
This move marks a crucial step for China’s foreign-related legal tools to move from institutional framework to practical enforcement. Leveraging the power of the rule of law, China has delivered a targeted response to US long-arm jurisdiction. The move defends the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises while heeding the international community’s widespread call to oppose hegemony, injecting justice into efforts to safeguard the international economic order.
China values its relations with the US and emphasizes that the essence of China-US economic and trade relations is mutual benefit and win-win outcomes. China advocates resolving concerns through dialogue on an equal-footing. However, since 2025, the US has imposed sanctions on Chinese refining, shipping and port enterprises under the pretext of “involvement in Iranian oil transactions,” freezing assets and prohibiting transactions. Under such circumstances, China’s issuance of the prohibition order in accordance with the Blocking Rules is a necessary measure to safeguard its national and corporate interests. Meanwhile, the Blocking Rules provide various institutional arrangements to steadily protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens, legal persons and other organizations.
The US’ arbitrary imposition of unilateral sanctions and reckless pursuit of “long-arm jurisdiction” constituted hegemonic practices that breach sovereign boundaries and coerce the global market. By placing its domestic law above international law and wantonly interfering in the normal economic and trade activities of enterprises in other countries, such actions completely violate the basic principle of sovereign equality in international relations and have long faced resolute opposition from the international community.
As early as 1996, the European Union adopted the Council Regulation protecting against the effects of the extra-territorial application of legislation adopted by a third country, blocking the extra-territorial application of the US Helms-Burton Act and D’Amato Act, which restricted trade with Cuba, Iran, and other countries. Today, the US has escalated its abuse of secondary sanctions, wielding the sanctions stick against law-abiding Chinese enterprises. This seriously infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese business entities and disrupted the stability of the global energy supply chain. In the face of hegemonic pressure, China’s issuance of a prohibition order in accordance with the law conforms to international practice and does not affect China’s assumption and fulfillment of its international obligations.
In recent years, in response to the evolving international economic and trade landscape, China has strengthened the development of its foreign-related legal system. It has established a series of legal tools, including the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, the Rules on Countering Foreign States’ Unlawful Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Measures, and the 2021 Blocking Rules. Laws such as the Foreign Trade Law, Export Control Law, and Foreign Investment Law have also been strengthened with provisions to safeguard the international economic and trade order, protect national sovereignty, security, and development interests, and defend the legitimate rights and interests of foreign trade operators. These legal instruments complement one another, each with its own emphasis, working together synergistically.
By issuing the prohibition order, China upholds the approach of countering hegemony with rules and defending fairness with the rule of law. It neither escalated confrontation nor made compromises, but instead negates the extraterritorial effect of the illegal US sanctions through lawful and compliant means, restoring international law to its original principle of sovereign equality. This measure not only provides relief to the affected enterprises and ensures the security of domestic industrial and supply chains, but also offers a practical example for the international community to resist unilateral bullying and oppose “long-arm jurisdiction.” It demonstrates China’s responsibility as a major country in upholding justice and defending order.
China has always advocated resolving international differences through equal dialogue, firmly upholding the multilateral trading system, and promoting inclusive economic globalization that benefits all. In the face of the countercurrent of unilateralism, China will continue to make full use of its foreign-related legal toolkit, remain resolute and be adept at defending its interests. While resolutely safeguarding its own sovereignty, security, and development interests, China will join hands with all peace-loving and rule‑of‑law-abiding countries to resist hegemonic acts and jointly promote the building of a more just, equitable, inclusive, and mutually beneficial global economic governance system.
This was compiled based on an article published in the “Chisu Jinsheng” economic commentary column of the People’s Daily on May 3, 2026. This is the translation of the Global Times English edition.
US blockade crumbles as Iran turns to overland routes
Press TV – April 30, 2026
As the US intensifies its inhuman sanctions and seeks to stifle Iran’s economy through an illegal naval blockade, Tehran has made strategic adjustments.
Pakistan formally activated a new transit corridor through Iran on Friday, announcing that the inaugural shipment including frozen meat bound for Tashkent, Uzbekistan had been dispatched via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Iranian overland routes.
The country designated six transit routes, including multiple key corridors connecting ports and border points inside Pakistan, forming a wide network for overland trade into Iran in a bid to bypass the maritime trade routes in the Persian Gulf.
The order, which took effect on April 25, aims to ease the logjam at Karachi Port and Port Qasim, where more than 3,000 Iran-bound containers have been stuck due to the ongoing US naval blockade of Iranian ports.
By using the new corridor, officials estimate travel time to the Iranian border will drop from 18 hours to just three hours, which in turn will lower logistics costs for regional traders.
The designated routes create a land bridge between Pakistan’s deep-sea ports and the Iranian border, offering a lifeline for third-country goods that would otherwise be vulnerable to US naval piracy at sea.
For China, the world’s largest oil importer and the destination for an estimated 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports before the current war, the opening of overland alternatives carries acute strategic significance.
With the US Navy enforcing an illegal cordon at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman since April 13, the maritime route that once carried one-fifth of global petroleum has been hijacked by an armed naval raid and subjected to systematic plunder.
The blockade’s primary target has always been as much about Beijing as Tehran. China purchases roughly 13 to 15 percent of its crude oil imports from Iran, volumes that before the war exceeded 1.38 million barrels per day.
Iranian crude, often trans-shipped through Malaysia and other intermediaries, feeds China’s independent “teapot” refineries and helps underpin Beijing’s energy security.
The Trump administration has made no secret of its intent to sever this flow. On April 23, Washington imposed sanctions on Hengli Petrochemical’s Dalian refinery, one of China’s largest independent processors, with 400,000 barrels per day capacity, alongside roughly 40 shipping companies and tankers involved in Iranian oil transport.
In a draconian announcement, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the US would constrict “the network of vessels, intermediaries and buyers Iran relies on to move its oil to global markets”.
Yet even as the American piracy tightens, the physical blockade is showing gaps. Satellite imagery and tracking data have revealed that several Iranian-flagged vessels under sanctions had sailed out of the Persian Gulf.
While tankers maneuver, Iran’s top diplomat has been building the political architecture for overland alternatives. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi embarked on a high-stakes tour on April 23, travelling twice to Pakistan for consultations and to coordinate the corridor activation before heading to Oman and finally to Russia.
In Islamabad, the discussions reportedly focused on key issues, the details of which are not specified. But the tangible outcome was the corridor itself.
Pakistan’s new transit routes, connecting Gwadar, Karachi and Port Qasim to the border crossings of Gabd and Taftan, provide Iran with immediate access to CPEC’s road and rail infrastructure.
Gwadar was built with Chinese loans and Chinese labor precisely as a hedge against maritime chokepoints. Now, with the Sea of Oman effectively closed, goods moving overland from Iran to Gwadar can connect to Chinese markets via the CPEC network, bypassing the US Navy entirely.
On April 27, Araghchi met with President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg for talks lasting more than 90 minutes. The Iranian foreign minister described the discussions as covering “all issues, both in bilateral relations and regional issues, as well as the issue of war and aggression by the US and Zionist regimes”.
According to media reports, the Russian president said Moscow “will do what it can to support the interests of Iran and other regional countries and help bring peace to West Asia as soon as possible”.
He added that “not only Russia, but now the whole world is admiring the Iranian people for their resistance against America”.
While Russia and Iran signed framework agreements on the International North-South Transport Corridor years ago, the current crisis has given those plans new urgency.
Araghchi used the St Petersburg meeting to reaffirm that Tehran views its relationship with Moscow as a “strategic partnership” that will continue “with greater strength and breadth”.
For China, Russia’s role is complementary. The INSTC offers a route from Mumbai to Moscow via Iranian rail links, a path that, if fully operationalized, would give Chinese goods another overland alternative to maritime shipping.
More immediately, Russia’s diplomatic cover complicates any US effort to pressure Pakistan or other neighbors into closing their borders to Iranian trade.
The central question for Washington is whether maritime piracy can achieve what missiles and airstrikes failed to deliver. After the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, it became clear that bombing alone would not bring down the country to its knees.
The blockade represents a shift to economic suffocation aiming to squeeze Iran’s oil revenues. But the strategy carries costs. Global oil prices remain elevated near $120 per barrel, stoking inflationary pressures across the US, Europe and beyond.
More fundamentally, the blockade’s success depends on land routes remaining closed. Pakistan’s activation of the transit corridor, Russia’s support, and China’s quiet integration of Gwadar into its supply chain collectively suggest that Tehran is building an overland escape hatch that the US Navy cannot interdict under any circumstance.
“Whenever there are sanctions or blockades, there will also be workarounds, whether informal channels or other flexible arrangements,” Wang Yiwei, director of Renmin University’s Institute of International Affairs, told The Straits Times. “The key question we should be asking is: can this blockade actually be sustained?”
For now, the answer appears uncertain but with each new overland corridor, Iran is proving impossible to seal and China unlikely to be starved.
US squares up to China over Panama Canal
RT | April 29, 2026
The US has announced a six-nation coalition aimed at pressuring China to relinquish its interests in two ports in the Panama Canal, accusing Beijing of infringing on Panama’s sovereignty and politicizing global trade. China has called the claims “baseless.”
The development is part of a pattern of US efforts to push China out of Latin America. The US National Security Strategy calls for non-Western “competitors” to be prevented from owning or controlling key assets in the Western Hemisphere.
Last year, US President Donald Trump claimed that China is “operating the Panama Canal” and threatened to “take it back.”
The US State Department issued a joint statement on Tuesday with Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guyana, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago, saying they support Panama against what they describe as external pressure from China.
”Any attempts to undermine Panama’s sovereignty are a threat to us all,” the statement read, adding that Panama “must remain free from any undue external pressure,” and that freedom in the region is “non-negotiable.”
China rejected the accusations, with the Foreign Ministry hitting back on Wednesday against what it called a smear campaign.
”It is the United States that is politicizing and over-securitizing the port issue… hypocritically posturing and spreading rumors and smears everywhere,” spokesman Lin Jian said, dismissing the claims as “baseless and a complete distortion of facts.”
Lin urged the countries involved not to “be deceived or used by forces with ulterior motives” regarding the port inspections, which he said were conducted lawfully.
The US-led campaign follows a ruling in January by Panama’s Supreme Court that annulled contracts held by a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings for the Balboa and Cristobal, two key ports at the canal’s entrances – a move that the US has backed.
The Chinese company, which managed the terminals for nearly three decades, has contested the ruling, alleging unlawful expropriation, and has launched international arbitration, seeking over $2 billion in reparations.
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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