John Rabe Essay

2000 Words8 Pages
“The student Fan Chi asked the Master what ‘jen’ (humanness) means. ‘to love men,’ Confucius replied.”[ Rabe, John. "Foreword." In The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, edited by Erwin Wickert, Viii. New York: A.A. Knopf :, 1998.] The Nanking Massacre, also called the rape of Nanking, is considered to be one of the most tragic and brutal event that has ever happened in the human history which took away thousands of lives. The encounter of two different groups of people could lead to a war, an alliance, or a mutual beneficial relationship; a brutal massacre happened in the case of the encounter between the Chinese and Japanese. The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe is a collection of the author’s, John Rabe, diaries that he kept with him during the Nanking Massacre; the book gives readers a detail accounts of John Rabe’s experience and the realistic description of the incident. John Rabe was an international businessman who spent almost thirty years of his life in China; throughout the thirty years he spent in China, though he did not learn any Chinese, he learned their lifestyle, their culture and traditions, and he also learned to think like a local Chinese[ Foreword, xiii].This dairy of John Rabe’s lets readers have a deeper understanding of how the Chinese, especially those in Nanking during the massacre, felt when they were under Japanese’s ferocious attack. John Rabe, a kindhearted man, believed the Nanking Massacre is not what a war should be like and that the Japanese had no rights to kill the Chinese people so brutally because it violated the ethics of men and human rights. China and Japan were considered two of the most powerful forces in Asia in the 19th century, and the two have fought many wars and battles against each other. The Nanking Massacre happened during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was the war that later lead
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