As Beijing prepares to hold a massive military parade to mark the end of the second world war, a derelict prison camp is restored to remind the world of Japan’s sins

Liu Linsheng placed bouquets of yellow and white chrysanthemums beside a sewage-choked creek and gazed over a wasteland where dozens of Chinese soldiers were bayonetted to death.

“This is a murder scene,” he said, pointing to a memorial stone he has erected at the heart of this northern mining hub about 500km south-west of Beijing.

The names of those responsible for the massacre had been carved into the rock in blood-red characters: the Japanese army chiefs who had run the place Liu calls “China’s Auschwitz”.

Nearly eight decades ago, as many as 100,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers – including Liu’s father – were captured and confined in the Taiyuan concentration camp by Japan’s imperial army.



Tens of thousands died, claimed Liu, a retired professor who has written a book about the prison that takes the name of the Nazi’s most infamous death camp.



“Some died from starvation and some from illness; some were beaten to death while others died working in places such as the coal mines,” he said. “The ones who suffered some of the cruellest deaths were those stabbed to death by Japanese soldiers’ bayonets.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Liu Linsheng brings flowers to the memorial site on the banks of the Sha river in Taiyuan. The site remembers hundreds of victims of a reported mass bayonetting by Japanese troops during the second world war. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix/The Guardian

The Taiyuan camp opened its gates in 1938 – one year after fighting between China and Japan officially broke out – and closed in 1945 when the war ended.



It witnessed stomach-churning evils during those years, Liu claimed. Female soldiers were raped or used for target practice by Japanese troops; vivisections were performed on prisoners; biological weapons were tested on unlucky interns.



Yet for all those horrors, the prison camp’s existence has been almost entirely wiped from the history books.



Most of its low-rise brick buildings were bulldozed in the 1950s and replaced by a grimy industrial estate that is to be demolished after years of abandonment.



Two surviving cellblocks – surrounded by clusters of high-rise apartments and derelict factories – were used as stables and then storerooms before falling into disrepair. Teams of woodlice patrol empty corridors once policed by Japanese guards.



“Many people don’t even know that this place exists,” complained Zhao Ameng, 60, whose father, a soldier named Zhao Peixian, fled the camp in 1940 as he was being taken to a nearby wasteland for execution.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The remains of the last two cellblocks at the camp. About 100,000 prisoners are said to have passed through its gates. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix/The Guardian

That may be about to change. With Beijing preparing to hold a massive military parade on 3 September to mark 70 years since Japan’s surrender, the camp’s story is being revived as part of a Communist party push to exalt its role in the war effort.



Party officials have instructed builders in Taiyuan to turn its ruins into a “patriotic education centre” where China’s sacrifices and Japan’s sins can be remembered.



All across China similar memorials are springing up in the countdown to the commemorations. Museums, art exhibitions and monuments linked to the “people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression” have thrown their doors open to visitors from east to west.



Publishing houses and studios are churning out books, documentaries and even cartoons on the period, with names such as Lies Written by Bayonet, Tunnel Warfare and Great Victory, Historic Contribution.



A website is publishing daily confessions from Japanese war criminals who admit to ghoulish and barbaric acts, including torture sessions, rapes and garrotings.



“Forgetting history is a betrayal,” the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, said in the run-up to the politically charged parade that western leaders, including Barack Obama and David Cameron, will shun.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Workers restore the few remaining cellblocks of the Taiyuan prison camp ahead of Chinese commemorations to mark 70 years since the end of the second world war. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix/The Guardian

China’s decision to restore the Taiyuan prison camp comes as a relief to the children of those who suffered there.



Liu, whose father, Liu Qinxiao, was a 27-year-old officer in Mao’s eighth route army when he was captured, has spent nearly a decade campaigning for its few remaining buildings to be protected.



But until this year his pleas had fallen on deaf ears, something he and Zhao Ameng blame on powerful real estate developers and officials hoping to cash in on the land.

The precise details of what happened in “China’s Auschwitz” remain a blur.

There have been no major academic studies of the camp, partly because of the Communist party’s long-standing reluctance to glorify the efforts of its nationalist enemies who did the bulk of the fighting against the Japanese and held Taiyuan when it fell to the Japanese in 1938.



Rana Mitter, the author of a book about the war in China called Forgotten Ally, said it was impossible to confirm “every single accusation of every single atrocity” perpetrated by Japanese forces in places such as Taiyuan.



“[But] we know through very objective research from Japanese, Chinese and western researchers … that the Japanese conquest of China in 1937 involved tremendous amounts of brutality, not just in Nanjing, which is the famous case, but actually plenty of other places.”



In the most notorious Japanese camp – a germ warfare research centre in Manchuria called Unit 731 – thousands of Chinese civilians were deliberately infected with deadly pathogens and then butchered by surgeons without anaesthetic.



For all Beijing’s new-found interest in the story of “China’s Auschwitz”, its retelling is unlikely to extend beyond 1945.



For during the Cultural Revolution, the Communist party accused many surviving prisoners of collaborating with the Japanese and branded them traitors.



Liu’s father, who had been imprisoned from December 1940 to June 1941, was packed off to a labour camp in inner Mongolia during the 60s and returned a broken man.



“My father always said, ‘The Japanese kept me in jail for seven months while the Communist party kept me in jail for seven years,’” he said.



“He felt it was very unfair … He felt he had done nothing wrong. I think one of the reasons he died so young – at just 73 – was that he was badly and unfairly treated in the Cultural Revolution.”



During a recent visit to the camp’s ruins Liu wandered through two crumbling shacks where builders were removing armfuls of rotting timber.



“[The prisoners] would sleep on the floor – one next to the other,” he said, pointing to what was once a cramped cell.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Liu Linsheng, whose father escaped the Taiyuan concentration camp, visiting its only remaining cell blocks. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix/The Guardian

Outside, Zhao used a broken roof tile to chisel away at a wall, uncovering part of a red character that he thought might have been left by the Japanese 80 years earlier.



Zhao, whose father died in 2007, recognised that the killing in the Taiyuan prison was not on the same scale as Auschwitz, where more than one million people were killed, most Jews.



“[But] the brutality committed in this camp was as bad as in Auschwitz, if not worse,” he said.



With the afternoon sun beating down, Liu and Zhao made their way to the banks of Taiyuan’s river Sha and tossed cartons of luxury Zhonghua cigarettes into its fetid waters in homage to their fallen and forgotten fathers.



“They were prisoners of war. They weren’t captured at home. They weren’t captured while working in the fields. They were captured on the battlefield fighting our enemies,” said Liu.



“Some of them were wounded, some of them were surrounded by enemies and some of them were captured after firing their last round of bullets. They became prisoners of war against their own will. Can you say they are not heroes?”

