This book is long overdue! International debate and historical research about the Japanese military comfort women system have mounted since the 1990s. At the same time, Chinese scholars and researchers have started to painstakingly document and investigate the sufferings of Chinese comfort women. Chinese Comfort Women, however, is the first English-language monograph that presents cutting-edge Chinese research into “comfort women” to the wider world. It does not just add Chinese comfort women to the long list of Imperial Japan's war atrocities, but also powerfully demonstrates that the hierarchically structured Japanese military comfort women system was a war crime.

Chinese Comfort Women emerges from the collaboration of three scholars: Peipei Qiu, a professor of Chinese and Japanese in the US who provides the historical context (part one) and descriptions of postwar survivor situations (part three), in addition to the English translation of the body of the book (part two), which is based on the research of Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, leading scholars of comfort women in China who have devoted decades interviewing comfort women survivors and documenting their experiences. Together, they marshal a wide range of materials – scholarship on the War against Japan and comfort women published in Chinese, Japanese and English; Japanese military and official documents compiled by Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki and the Asian Women's Fund; eyewitness accounts, diaries and writings of Chinese civilians and military men, Japanese military men, and other nationals who witnessed the war atrocities in China; interrogation records of captured Japanese military men and their Chinese collaborators; recently published collections of investigative reports of Japanese military conduct in China; and, essentially, testimonies of comfort women survivors.

The authors select 12 women's accounts from the interviews conducted by Su and Chen with over 100 comfort women survivors to represent the wide geographical and temporal spectrum of sexual violence conducted by Imperial Japanese troops. In contrast to comfort women from other parts of East Asia who were recruited during the war (1937–45), Chinese women, who counted for half of the estimated total of 400,000 victims (p. 4), had been forced into sexual slavery since 1931 when Japan occupied Northeast China. While Korean and Japanese women were tricked into comfort stations by false job offers and militaristic brainwashing, the vast majority of Chinese women, from the Northeast to the southern island of Hainan, were kidnapped directly by Japanese troops. While poor Korean and Japanese families were paid for their daughters' false job offers, Chinese families had to pay large sums of money to Japanese troops to ransom their women, whose abduction was often accompanied by the torture or murder of their close family members. While most Korean and Japanese women were kept in regulated comfort stations, the majority of Chinese women were detained under slavish conditions in military barracks, blockhouses, mountain caves and civilian homes. The extremely brutal treatment of enemy nationals by Imperial Japanese troops resulted in a very high mortality rate among Chinese comfort women. For the few survivors, their suffering did not end with Japan's defeat. Rather, they were treated by their compatriots in post-war China as immoral women who had served the nation's enemy. But, as the authors have clearly shown, Chinese comfort women were no passive victims. Instead, they had risked their lives to escape from the Japanese sexual enslavement during the war and, by the 1990s, they had bravely voiced their demand for redress of their lifelong physical and emotional pain.

Meticulously presenting the evidence of Imperial Japan's vicious sexual enslavement in China, the authors convincingly refute the rightist denial of Japanese military involvement in forcing women into comfort stations. Their evidence effectively demonstrates that Japanese officers both permitted and ordered troops to carry out sexual violence and participated in it directly. Not only large military units set up comfort stations where troops were located, even a platoon or a squadron would set up makeshift comfort facilities on the frontline, where the most brutal sexual crimes often happened. The massive abduction of Chinese women into sexual slavery and the negligible medical service in comfort stations further debunk the militarist alleged “purpose” of preventing the rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease. The staggering volume of evidence presented in the book poignantly proves that the comfort women system was a war crime, which was “implemented for militarist war-related purposes and was made possible precisely because of the context provided by the war” (p. 12).

Chinese Comfort Women presents a crucial contribution to the studies of war, memories, gender and the burgeoning research of comfort women in particular. Written in clear and simple prose, it could be easily adopted as a class reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on modern China, war memories and gender studies. It could also appeal to the general public who aspire to end wars and build peace.