Don Tow's Website

Recently we hear a lot of criticisms from countries like Philippines, Vietnam, and especially the U.S. regarding China’s actions on some of the islands, e.g., the Spratly Islands, in the South China Sea. These criticisms claim that (1) China has no rights to claim sovereignty over these islands, (2) China’s construction activities in these islands, including landfills, building oil rigs and constructing air strips, are illegal and represent an act of military expansion and threaten the security of the region, and (3) China wants to restrict freedom of navigation through the South China Sea.

This article addresses these issues, from historical, legal, and world-politics perspectives.
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After completing his academy award-winning classic “Schindler’s List” in 1994, film director/producer Steven Spielberg was inspired to donate and establish the “Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation” which later became the “USC (University of Southern California) Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education,” which interviews and records thousands of survivors of Holocaust and other genocides so that their testimonies will be preserved in perpetuity before their stories would be lost forever.  This archive now contains over 50,000 testimonies in 39 languages from 62 countries, with the majority being Jewish Holocaust survivors, but also contains testimonies from other genocides around the world.

While the Jewish Holocaust was taking place in Europe during WWII, an atrocity of equal magnitude was also occurring in Asia at around the same time period. This was the atrocity inflicted by the Japanese military in China, Korea, and other parts of Asia during the period of 1931-1945 when Japan invaded and tried to conquer China and other parts of Asia.   The atrocities were massive and inhumane and consisted of four types:  the Nanking Massacre, sex slaves (euphemistically called comfort women), biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and slave labor. [1]

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