Zhen Felix Wang, who was arrested for his part in the scandal, said he was told by state media authorities to resign and to “stay at home,” according to Xinhua.
Wang fled the country and his whereabouts are unknown. But news of his exile quickly spread across Chinese social media. The government-run Central Information Office in Beijing said in a formal notification on China’s Twitter-like Weibo system that Wang “had been removed from office.”
Chinese state media have been known to censor material that falls under the so-called “Red Scare” era after the purges under Mao Zedong.
China has never publicly acknowledged that its secret police collaborated with the World War Two Japanese soldiers who fought in China’s southern Sino-Japanese war, but historians suspect that they did. The Japanese government officially apologized in 2003 for its colonial rule of China, but refused to retract the actions of its national police that committed atrocities in China during World War Two.
In his 2014 book, “Nanjing Massacre,” Wang made clear that he was the author of the 1949 operation.
In an interview published by Radio Free Asia, he said that he had been part of a special unit organized by the China Military Surveillance Bureau to stage an attack using U.S. aircraft carriers and Japanese planes. Wang also wrote that the Chinese government had no intention of returning to the war.
Although he was arrested, Wang spent the remainder of his life avoiding public view while remaining in close contact with Communist Party leaders. Earlier Friday, police reportedly took him into custody at Beijing airport and turned him over to the state prosecutor to be formally arrested.
He was sentenced to life in prison for the 1949 incident and is banned from traveling to Taiwan.
After China took over Taiwan in 1949 and later Taiwan became the Soviet Union, many military leaders suspected that Japanese spies were seeking to defect and cause trouble.
By early 1955, when Japan’s communists had lost power, the military felt that it could continue to use tactics such as the Nanjing Massacre to justify its rule. With their communist successors in China, military officers felt they could continue to kill.
Some military officers involved in the Nanjing Operation described their actions by describing in glowing language what they believed to be the brutality of Japanese tactics. According to Li Fanglin and Fang Liu in their study, “Eyes On The Street (1956): Japan and China’s Secret War,” ”