Continuity between the Eighth Route Army’s Prisoner-of-War Policy and the Chinese Communist Party’s Postwar War Criminals Management

This article reexamines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) postwar policy toward Japanese war criminals by tracing its ideological and institutional origins to the prisoner-of-war policies implemented by the Eighth Route Army during the War of Resistance against Japan. Rather than interpreting the CCP’s post-1949 war crimes management policy solely as a product of Cold War diplomacy or humanitarian considerations, this study situates it within a longer continuum of revolutionary political practice that conceptualized enemy combatants not merely as subjects of punishment but as objects of ideological transformation. Drawing primarily on the Yenan Report compiled by the United States Army Observer Group, this article analyzes the CCP’s wartime treatment of Japanese prisoners, including preferential treatment policies, political education, the operation of Japanese Workers’ and Peasants’ Schools, and the emergence of Japanese antiwar organizations. These practices are understood not as isolated acts of humanitarianism but as integral components of a broader strategy of psychological warfare that sought to incorporate prisoners into wartime mobilization and postwar political reconstruction. They also reflected a distinctive mode of “revolutionary human transformation” characteristic of CCP political culture. The article further demonstrates how the operational principles of wartime prisoner policy were institutionalized in the postwar management of Japanese war criminals, particularly in the 1950s system of war criminal management camps, the practice of confession-based education, and the guiding principle of “leniency toward the majority and punishment of a very few.” By highlighting this continuity, the study challenges binary interpretations that portray the CCP’s leniency policy either as moral superiority or as political manipulation. Instead, it argues that the policy should be understood as a strategic form of governance shaped by the interaction between international political realities and revolutionary ideological practice.