By Palden Sonam Taipei Times 20 March 2021

Once I watched a Chinese movie called The Flowers of War, which depicts the horrors of war atrocities in Nanjing when Imperial Japan occupied the Chinese city in 1937.

In one of the most heart-rending scenes from the movie, a Chinese woman with her hands tied was repeatedly raped by Japanese Imperial troops. In the end, a Japanese soldier stabbed her to death with a bayonet when she tried to resist his assault.

A similar nightmare-like image popped up in the back of my mind when I was reading the recent accounts of rape and sexual abuses against Uighur women by Chinese authorities in the concentration camps in East Turkestan, or Xinjiang. There are striking similarities between the two cases of sexual abuses committed by the Japanese troops in 1937 and Chinese authorities in Xinjiang today.

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