LettersChina and Japan in World War II: if thousands of Hong Kong students got DSE history answer wrong – what does that reveal?
- Commentators and academics who defended the controversial question were confident that any student who had studied the DSE curriculum would know about the Japanese invasion and atrocities inflicted upon China. But they were wrong
Only 57 per cent of candidates disagreed that Japan did more good than harm; 17 per cent mentioned only the good done by Japan while nearly 5 per cent did not take a stance.
It should be recalled that a cross-section of the community, including certain academicians, writers, lawyers and politicians, had vociferously defended the question. Many of them expressed the view that the question was not biased.
However, no one I am aware of offered to defend the question that I and many others posed: do you agree that the Holocaust caused more good than harm to the Jews? They further confidently asserted that any student who had studied the DSE curriculum would have known of the Japanese invasion and aggression that brought immense loss, pain and suffering to the Chinese people. Clearly this was not the case, and those commentators were wrong.
From the numbers, we can deduce that 21 per cent of candidates did not consider war crimes, including 14 years of invasion and occupation of China, the Nanking massacre, comfort women, the “three alls” policy (“kill all, burn all and loot all”), and the lethal experiments conducted on Chinese civilians by Unit 731, as obviously atrocious or heinous.