5 replies to this topic

[galvatron prime]

Unit 731 Ruins: World Heritage or Not?
http://english.cri.c...2021s583015.htm
China wants to turn the ruins of Unit 731, a camp where the Japanese Army conducted grisly human experiments as part of its germ warfare program, into a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. However, the application has aroused debate in China, the China Business Times reports.

According to the report, Unit 731 was based in the Pingfang District of Harbin in northeast China's Heilongjiang province, and the use of its biological weapons during World War II resulted in possibly as many as 200,000 deaths of military personnel and civilians in China. The authorities of Pingfang District plan to triple the size of its Unit 731 memorial and turn it into a park to be registered as a World Heritage Site.

The report noted that the ruins still fall short in several key requirements for the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and local authorities are stepping up efforts to meet the requirements.

Jin Chenmin, an expert on modern history, told the newspaper that the Unit 731 ruins should become a base for worldwide anti-fascist education.

"The ruins meet the list's criteria, as it is associated with events of outstanding universal significance, just as Auschwitz in Poland and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan are on the World Heritage Site list. As the world's largest germ warfare program site, Unit 731 should also qualify since the remaining ruins can serve as a reminder of the horrible atrocities Japanese troops committed in China" Jin said.

However, a news commentator named Yan Yang disagreed with the application, considering the Unit 731 ruins as an evil legacy.

"The Unit 731 ruins reflect bloody culture and it is not proper to list it as World Heritage." Yan said.

The report also said that some experts thought that the local authorities' main motive in applying may be the tourism and economic effects of becoming a World Heritage Site.

Shall Unit 731 Ruins turn into World Heritage Site?

[mohistManiac]

Shall Unit 731 Ruins turn into World Heritage Site?

What does it mean for a memorial park like that to become a base for world wide anti fascist education? Do they mean to set up an operation where they publish material to the rest of the world concerning matters of what happened there as they continue to discover more?

[Yizheng]

History is always politicised to a greater or lesser extent, and ideas like this usually have a political (and even economic) motive too. I believe strongly that the Unit 731 ruins should certainly be preserved and open to the public as place where they can indeed learn about what happened there. It is important to preserve memory, good and bad, and to have actual sites that bore witness to events. The Pingfang ruins have been open for some time now as a place where people can visit, and that is good.

But I don't see that it necessarily has to be listed as world heritage site. If people believe strongly in the value of preserving the memory of those events there and educating about that time, they would do it regardless of the formal status of the site. As for the idea of turning it into an anti-fascist education centre, this sound to me like where history starts to become politicised. What does 'anti-fascist' mean exactly? Is 'fascist' defined as perhaps any of the brutal dictatorship regime that enslaves its own and other peoples and stops short of no crimes and tortures? Or is just the regimes that lost WWII? i do not personally believe it would turn out a very objective centre, given that even democratic countries have a hard enough time with this sort of thing, let alone non-democratic ones.

It is certainly good to have broad education on WWII, and I think that what happened at Unit 731 and the other japanese biolgical and chemical warfare units around China must be known, and is relevant still to today's world. I would say, they should go ahead with to preserve it and develop it as a museum and historical education centre regardless of whatever UNESCO status.

[ahxiang]

History is always politicised to a greater or lesser extent, and ideas like this usually have a political (and even economic) motive too. I believe strongly that the Unit 731 ruins should certainly be preserved and open to the public as place where they can indeed learn about what happened there. It is important to preserve memory, good and bad, and to have actual sites that bore witness to events. The Pingfang ruins have been open for some time now as a place where people can visit, and that is good.

But I don't see that it necessarily has to be listed as world heritage site. If people believe strongly in the value of preserving the memory of those events there and educating about that time, they would do it regardless of the formal status of the site. As for the idea of turning it into an anti-fascist education centre, this sound to me like where history starts to become politicised. What does 'anti-fascist' mean exactly? Is 'fascist' defined as perhaps any of the brutal dictatorship regime that enslaves its own and other peoples and stops short of no crimes and tortures? Or is just the regimes that lost WWII? i do not personally believe it would turn out a very objective centre, given that even democratic countries have a hard enough time with this sort of thing, let alone non-democratic ones.

It is certainly good to have broad education on WWII, and I think that what happened at Unit 731 and the other japanese biolgical and chemical warfare units around China must be known, and is relevant still to today's world. I would say, they should go ahead with to preserve it and develop it as a museum and historical education centre regardless of whatever UNESCO status.

One thing I want to add is that the achievements of modern medicine, including those of major European and American pharmaceutical factories, can't be separated from the research results of Japanese and German biological and chemical warfare.

[Gan]

Maybe they should start another type of designation. Take the Unit731 Ruins and all the other places similar to it, and label it under "Remembering what evil can do" status.

[Yizheng]

One thing I want to add is that the achievements of modern medicine, including those of major European and American pharmaceutical factories, can't be separated from the research results of Japanese and German biological and chemical warfare.

yes, this should be remembered too as part of this whole piece of history. We should not forget that the Americans did not prosecute the Unit 731 people in exchange for their research results. The Soviet Union did prosecute a group of them in the Khabarovsk trial, but I'm sure they did not forget to squeeze what scientific information they could get from them in the process, only that would have been secret. Many of those Unit 731 people had successful and respectable careers afterwards in Japan, never had to answer for their crimes. And the whole episode was kept hushed up at the Tokyo trial.

Maybe they should start another type of designation. Take the Unit731 Ruins and all the other places similar to it, and label it under "Remembering what evil can do" status.

this is a possibility to think about. After all, these sorts of places are part of humanity's heritage, but it is a tragic heritage, and should be perhaps given a special status as places of remembrance. The only problem is that on the practical level it would be hard to get the international community to come an agreement on the whole thing, because of the way history and politics always end up mixing. To give just one example, Katyn in Russia, say, is the site of mass graves of Polish officers shot by Stalin's secret police, but it is only just now that Russia has started admitting the reality of what happened there. In fact, there are quite a lot of disputes between former Soviet countries over commemorating tragic events in history, and how to remember them. There are many cases where attempts to establish remembrance centres would become very politicised and lead to tension between countries' relations.