Miner Searle Bates: historian and witness

Refugees at the University of Nanking camp, one of the largest in the Safety Zone, 1937–38. Searle Bates, the university’s historian and from January 1938 its vice-president, was responsible for its buildings and the thousands who lived in them. Photo: Unknown photographer, Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre collection, PD China via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

Miner Searle Bates: Historian and Witness

A Rhodes Scholar and China historian who kept the University of Nanking’s camps, wrote the protests, counted the dead and testified in Tokyo.

Miner Searle Bates was a professional historian of China, and he approached the occupation of Nanjing as one. He had taught at the University of Nanking, an American-supported Christian university, since 1920, and in 1935 had completed a Yale doctorate in Chinese history. In the summer of 1937 he took his wife and two children to Japan for safety and came back to Nanjing alone. When the city fell on 13 December he was responsible for the university’s buildings, which held some of the largest refugee camps in the Safety Zone.

Bates did three things that make him one of the key witnesses. He protested to the Japanese embassy, in writing and in person, from the second day of the occupation, documenting cases on the university’s own grounds. He collected and analysed what the committee knew about the scale of the killing, and his estimates were published in 1938 by the Manchester Guardian correspondent H. J. Timperley. And after the war he travelled to Tokyo to testify before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and later gave evidence for the Chinese trials of war criminals.

His papers, his letters and his trial testimony are among the sources that historians on all sides of the Nanjing debate have had to deal with. This page follows his career and shows where his figures fit among the estimates. The University of Nanking’s role in the Safety Zone is described in Chapter 5, and the trials in Chapter 8.

Hiram, Oxford, Mesopotamia and Nanjing

Bates was born on 28 May 1897 in Newark, Ohio, the son of a minister who later became president of Hiram College. He graduated from Hiram in 1916 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. When the United States entered the First World War he joined the YMCA and served with it in Mesopotamia until the war ended, then completed his Oxford degree and some graduate work in 1920. That summer the United Christian Missionary Society commissioned him to teach history at the University of Nanking.

In 1923 he married Lilliath Robbins, a Canadian who taught at Ginling College across the city. He spent 1934–35 at Harvard as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, studying Japanese and Russian, and received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale in 1935. The Japanese he studied at Harvard was a rare skill among the Westerners who stayed in Nanjing in 1937.

Protest from the second day

The Yale Divinity Library records that Bates lodged his first protest with the Japanese embassy two days after the city fell. The university’s buildings, from the library to the dormitories and the agricultural school, had been turned into camps, and soldiers came into them day and night. His letters to the embassy list incidents on the university’s property, with dates and places: women taken from the buildings, men led away, property seized. A long letter of protest followed on 10 January 1938. These are contemporary documents addressed to the Japanese authorities; many were later printed with the committee’s papers.

Iris Chang, drawing on his papers and interviews, describes Bates being pushed down a flight of stairs by Japanese military police when he asked about a student who had been taken away, pulling soldiers off women, and having a pistol held to his head more than once. Those details come from Chang’s book and the summaries that follow it rather than from a document of the time; they are consistent with what his own letters describe. On 13 January 1938 the university named him its vice-president.

Counting the dead

Bates also tried to measure the killing. In early 1938 he estimated that about 40,000 unarmed people had been killed within and near the walls in the first weeks, and that about 30 per cent of them had never been soldiers. Timperley, who had been in Shanghai and was not a witness, published Bates’s figures in his collection of eyewitness documents, What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China (London, 1938; published in New York as Japanese Terror in China). The Yale Divinity Library calls Bates “a major moving spirit” behind the book.

It is important to read the figure for what it was. Bates counted what the International Committee and its burial teams knew in the walled city and its edge, in the first weeks. He did not count the mass executions of prisoners on the Yangtze banks north of the city, which the Westerners could not reach, or the killing in the surrounding counties. His University of Nanking colleague Lewis Smythe made a separate sample survey of households in the spring of 1938, counting civilians only. Later tribunals and historians, counting over a wider area and longer period and drawing on Japanese army records, burial records and survivor testimony, arrived at higher totals. The full range is in Chapter 3.

Four more years in occupied Nanjing

Bates did not leave. Apart from seven short trips to Japan and one to Spain for conferences, the Yale biography records, he stayed in Nanjing from 1937 to 1941, running what was left of the university under occupation and working with the Nanking International Relief Committee. He continued to write about Japanese rule, “fearlessly challenging the activities of the Japanese authorities, especially narcotics-trafficking,” in Yale’s words.

Witness in Tokyo and Nanjing

In the summer of 1946 Bates travelled to Tokyo as a witness for the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. His testimony, recorded in the transcript at pages 2624 to 2675, described the conduct of the troops in the university’s camps and the city, and his estimate that the terror had been serious for six to seven weeks after the fall became one of the most widely cited measures of its duration. The tribunal’s judgment found that the atrocities at Nanking “continued to be committed on a large scale for at least six weeks after the city had been taken.” He also gave evidence for the Chinese trials of Japanese war criminals held in Nanjing in 1946–47.

His testimony, like the other Americans’, is postwar evidence. Its weight rests on the letters, protests and figures he had written at the time, which the defence could test. The tribunal’s use of the American witnesses, and the arguments of the defence, are discussed in Chapter 8.

After China

Bates returned to the United States in 1950. He became Professor of Missions at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he taught until 1965. His best-known book, Religious Liberty: An Inquiry (1945), was a worldwide study of religious freedom and persecution. He died in New York in 1978. His papers, from 1927 to 1984, are held in the Burke Library archives at Columbia University, and the Yale Divinity Library holds copies of his Nanjing correspondence in its Nanking Massacre Project.