Commentary | Ming Gao, Historical Justice on Trial: The First Domestic Lawsuit by Chinese Comfort Women's Descendants Against Japan
Late Zhang Xiantu, one of the former Chinese “comfort women”, recalled her first encounter with the Japanese soldiers invading China: “in March 1941 seven or eight of them entered my home and took turns raping me for several hours until my private part was awash with blood”. Before then, Zhang was sexually inexperienced. Afterwards, she was abducted as a comfort woman at the age of 15.
Last month, the children of Zhang Xiantu and other 17 deceased former Chinese comfort women filed a groundbreaking first-ever lawsuit against the Japanese government in a High Court in Shanxi province, China. They are seeking monetary compensation up to two million yuan (approximately US$ 280,000) and a public apology for the severe violations the women suffered, including kidnapping, detention, rape, beating, abuse, torture, injury, and sexually transmitted diseases. The lawsuit is spearheaded by Zhang Shuangbing, an activist who has been at the forefront of the comfort women rights movement for more than four decades and is assisted by a legal team represented by Jia Fangyi and Guo Chengxi.
The Shanxi lawsuit rightly emphasises the severe violation of human rights as also vividly shown by the experiences of Zhao Runmei. Zhao was both one of the estimated 200,000 Chinese comfort women and one of the deceased mentioned above. In April 1941, Zhao was raped by a group of Japanese soldiers too. Moments earlier, she had just witnessed the grotesque scene of her neighbour Cai Yinzhu’s internal organs spilling out after Japanese soldiers stabbed into Cai’s stomach. Immediately after, they killed Zhao’s foster parents in front of her, pricking through her father’s throat with a bayonet and then slashing the back of her mother’s head. “Right there, beside the bloody corpses, I was gangraped by more than a dozen soldiers right away on the spot. Afterwards, I was taken to a ‘comfort facility’ to be raped every day” as a comfort woman. Zhao was 16 years old and sexually inexperienced too before then.
The term “comfort women” is a euphemism that stems from the Japanese title ianfu. Arguably, Japanese military authorities systematically implemented the comfort women system in China following the 'Rape of Nanjing' in 1937, although the origins of the system may trace back to early 1930s in Shanghai. The system institutionalised a state-sanctioned regime of sexual slavery that serviced the military against the will of countless women, a significant number of whom were from China and Korea. The comfort women issue therefore remains a contentious and poignant topic, as it involves large numbers of women and girls who were subjected to sexual violence and exploitation by the Imperial Japanese military.
This Shanxi lawsuit marks a groundbreaking moment, representing the first direct Chinese domestic legal challenge to Japan's wartime atrocities, amid a decades-long, largely unsuccessful transnational battle for justice. Between 1995 and 2007, dozens of litigations were filed in Japan, including those participated by the aforementioned Zhang Xiantu, who passed away in November 2015.
Therefore, this domestic legal case highlights a critical moment in the history of the Chinese comfort women movements, as I have argued elsewhere. But, as I explain below, this moment also signifies a critical emergence of historical significance in three ways.
In the first place, this first lawsuit represents a significant advancement in the pursuit of justice. It also represents a crucial shift from seeking redress abroad to mobilising domestic resources, including the Chinese legal system, to confront Japanese government denialism about the atrocities committed against comfort women. Specifically, this occurs when the courts in Japan, citing Article 5 of the 1972 Sino-Japan Joint Communiqué in which “it [China] renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan”, denies comfort women’s requests for an apology and compensation after all legal options in Japanese courts have been exhausted. In April 2007, the Supreme Court of Japan stated that the Communiqué had effectively relinquished the rights of Chinese to pursue compensation in court for wartime damages. This marked the official end of the road for Chinese comfort women seeking justice in Japan. Yes, at the time, the Chinese government gave up pursuing legal actions against Japan for its wartime crimes, as China prioritised the diplomatic normalisation with Japan. But the individual rights of Chinese citizens remain in a grey zone.
As expressed by the legal team, this first ever lawsuit in China draws inspiration from successful civil lawsuits in Korea. The Seoul Central District Court in 2021 ruled in a civil lawsuit filed by 12 Korean comfort women against the Japanese government that Japan must pay 100 million won (US$ 73,000) to each victim. In another case in November 2023, the court ordered the Japanese government to pay 200 million won (US$ 146,000) to each of another 16 comfort women survivors.
Next, this first lawsuit might spark a chain of additional domestic legal actions against Japan regarding victims and survivors of other wartime crimes committed in China during World War II. They may relate to the Kwantung Army's conscription and abuse of comfort women, Unit 731's bacteriological weapons experiments on Chinese, the detention of British and American prisoners of war, the forced enslavement of labourers, and other war atrocities committed by the Japanese army. For instance, Japanese poison gas bombs and weapons abandoned at the end of the Second World War continue to adversely affect lives and livelihoods in some areas of China. The ripple effects of this first-ever lawsuit in China are, at best, transformative and, at worst, incendiary. It remains to be seen how these ongoing issues will influence future legal actions and international relations.
Finally, the lawsuit mounted by the descendants of comfort women could create a road map for future trajectories to seek justice. The late Wan Aihua, who was among the 18 deceased women, had long ago signed a document at the Shanghai Notary Office in 2007, authorising her relatives to continue pursuing justice after her death.
We are gradually approaching a post-memory period, as the number of surviving comfort women dwindles. Coincidentally, with eight registered survivors respectively in China and Korea as of early 2024, the movements for reconciliation and redress will soon transition into a new phase without live witnesses of the historical events. This first lawsuit may prove critical as countries sharing the history of joint victimhood of sexual slavery and exploitation will address these unresolved historical issues, either individually or collectively. This first lawsuit may become crucial in that sense.
However, the path forward remains fraught with challenges, requiring concerted and sustained efforts. To begin with, the execution of a judgment is challenging. It is impossible to enforce a verdict ordering a state to compensate individuals when a sovereign country is involved, particularly given the international legal principle of state immunity. The Korean case from 2021 offers a sobering example. Although nearly three years have passed, the 12 comfort women have not yet received any compensation from the 100 million won verdict. The prospect of receiving the compensation remains bleak.
Second, government attitudes matter. Unlike the situation in South Korea, the Chinese government’s attitudes toward the comfort women issue have been equivocal. According to Su Zhiliang, China overlooked the issue of wartime sexual violence against Chinese women when normalising Sino-Japanese relations in 1972. This ambiguous position has been consistent for decades well into the noughties.
This adds another layer of uncertainty to the outcome of any individual-versus-state lawsuit, regardless of which country the state represents. There is a glimmer of hope, though it is best to be realistic, particularly given the changing context of Sino-Japanese relations caught amidst geopolitical tensions and China’s nationalism has increasingly intertwined with the narratives of the victimised history of comfort women. For example, the highest echelons of the Chinese government have issued instructions three times, directing relevant Chinese authorities and scholars to expedite the overall research into, and preservation of, archives related to Japan’s invasion of China. This includes the comfort women research and its archival preservation. Partly as such, we all hope for a favourable result from the court.
Lastly, a systemic and sustainable network is insufficient. Establishing an expansive civil support network, like what has been seen in Korea, requires decades of collective efforts. For instance, although the Chinese Women's Federation (Fulian) issued a statement supporting Chinese comfort women's litigation against Japan in 2001, their efforts largely remained nominal and symbolic.
That said, a systemic and sustainable support network could fundamentally benefit from university education raising awareness of gendered violence, and sexual abuse etc. more broadly in society. While the Korean comfort women movements can trace their strong intellectual support back to the 1970s when women’s studies were being taught at universities (e.g. Ewha Womans University), the universities have been key in educating students and researchers, as well as providing crucial insights into gender-based violence, sexual exploitation, and contemporary gender relations in Korean society.
In contrast, women’s studies have barely been a mainstream academic area in China, although Chinese women’s studies and women activism started in the 1990s owing partly to the hosting of the Beijing United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Nonetheless, China Women’s University established its first women's studies programme in 2001, with the first batch of undergraduates enrolled only in 2006. This is more than a decade behind the progress seen in Indonesia, where comfort women movements lagged far behind that of Korea. By 2022, it seems that only three universities in China offered programmes in such areas, and their societal impact remains quite limited compared to the societies in Korea, Japan, and even Indonesia.
Over the previous decades, awareness and understanding of this aspect of China’s history were limited, which hindered any significant development of redress movements or transnational activism to advocate for their rights. Unlike their Korean counterparts, the issue of Chinese “comfort women” rarely makes its way into international news. Research and attention on them are notoriously limited in Anglophone academe as well. Scholars such as Hayashi Hirofumi even contends that there is a tendency to “overestimate the involvement of Korean women”. The number of Chinese comfort women, estimated at 200,000, was only somewhat ascertained in Anglophone academia in 2013, following the publication of the first collection of their testimonies by scholars Qiu Peipei, Su Zhiliang, and Chen Lifei. The publication makes research into Chinese comfort women possible, an area that was otherwise previously relatively inaccessible. Moreover, this estimate brings the total number of comfort women from China and Korea alone to approximately 400,000.
However, both China and Korea share similar miserable history and collective memory of comfort women with arguably similar numbers at 200,000, but the redress movements diverge dramatically. Korea’s active global movements in Austrasia, Europe, or the United States, offer useful insights into the advocacy and pursuits on seeking justice. In comparison, China’s efforts in this area are very limited. This, by all accounts, highlights a glaring disparity with Korea’s proactive stance.
This lack of broad intellectual base and support is one of the main reasons why it has taken so long for such a lawsuit to emerge in China. It also explains why even the first ever lawsuit is modelled on, and inspired by, Korean cases.
As is widely known, the issue of comfort women has been a significant topic of diplomacy and social/transnational activism involving Japan, Korea, and beyond. To this day, it is still deeply entangled with issues of nationalism, imperialism, and the politics of remembering. While this may be the first high-profile case in China, it is unlikely to become a prominent diplomatic sticking point between China and Japan, given the Chinese government’s consistent stance over the past decades. It is certainly not likely to escalate into a diplomatically contentious dispute as seen between Korea and Japan.
Ironically, on 19 April 2024, the day after the Shanxi lawsuit, Monbukagakusho (Japan’s Education Ministry) finally approved the revision of the middle school history textbook by publisher Reiwa Shoseki. By officially endorsing the textbook revision, the Japanese government seems to have adopted the perspective stated in the textbook: that comfort women were paid prostitutes who received fair payment for their work and that the Japanese military authorities bore no responsibility for any wrongdoing.
Can justice be replicated and reinstated? Yes, it can, but doing so demands collective efforts not only from the support within China but from international community. We have seen grassroots support from Japan following an incident on 4 August 2003, in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang province, where poisons from chemical weapons abandoned by the former Japanese army leaked, injuring more than 40 people (the youngest being 9 years old and the oldest 51). Among the severely injured, Li Guizhen passed away miserably.
We have also seen how Indonesian comfort women have broken their silence with the help from transnational activism support from Korea and Japan. In China’s case, the lawsuit has immediately gained international support from Japan. Less than a week after the filing, one Japanese civil organisation led by scholar Ishida Yoneko issued a public statement in support of the comfort women’s descendants seeking restoration of justice from the atrocities and crime committed by Japan. However, in the long run, a strong grassroots support within China is also needed as discussed above.
Personally, as a male scholar, I often get asked about my experiences researching this period of harrowing, horrific history of comfort women. The short answer is that it is traumatising, and the long answer is that it is transformative. The insights I have gained from the suffering, strength, and silence of those women have profoundly transformed me into a feminist. In part because of this, scholarly and intellectually, I conduct my research aiming to amplify voices that history has tried to silence and to advocate for justice that governments have tried to deny. I hope in the coming years or decades China’s understanding of its own comfort women history will be remade as a growing community of researchers approach this period of inhumane history within academia and beyond.
For decades, Korea has been at the forefront of redress movements for comfort women at all levels. Their commitment has time and time again inspired China and other countries. However, in return, the first-ever lawsuit case in China may now serve as a fine example for Korea, as all stakeholders will fight for justice on behalf of all deceased comfort women, one day.
Women’s studies in China confers degrees in law. The conferment of law degrees perhaps has precisely captured the essence of women studies in how to empower and protect the weak as we wrestle with the shadows of historical injustices. No matter what the decision will be, the Shanxi case will make legal history.
Dr. Ming Gao is a scholar of modern East Asia at Australian Catholic University and Monash University. He researches the gendered dynamics of violence, emotions, women's history, and the Japanese empire. He now resides in Melbourne and has previously studied and/or worked in Korea, Japan, Singapore, the United States, and China. He is proficient in English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. The author also wishes to express deep gratitude to Professor Tristan Grunow for his generous help, feedback, and copy-editing. Any errors remain my own. Contact him at drgao20@gmail.com
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Ming Gao, “Historical Justice on Trial: The First Domestic Lawsuit by Chinese Comfort Women's Descendants Against Japan,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, May 27, 2024. https://doi.org/10.52698/DGBQ8896.