The decision was made during a three day UNESCO meeting from Oct. 4 to 6 in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, following a two-year process as part of the 2014-2015 nomination cycle during which 88 submissions from 61 countries were examined.
According to UNESCO, Documents of the Nanjing Massacre consists of three parts: the first part concerns the period of the massacre (1937-1938), the second part is related to the post-war investigation and trials of war criminals 1945-1947, and the third part deals with legal files documented 1952-1956.
On Dec. 13, 1937 when Japanese invaders occupied Nanjing in east China, they began six weeks of destruction, pillage and slaughter in the city, which were planned, organized and purposefully executed. Over 300,000 Chinese, including defenseless civilians and unarmed soldiers, were murdered, together with countless cases of rape, looting and arson.
The Memory of the World Register is the list of documentary heritage under UNESCO's Memory of the World Program which was set up in 1992 to "preserve documentary heritage and memory for the benefit of present and future generations in the spirit of international cooperation and mutual understanding, building peace in the minds of women and men".
With Documents of the Nanjing Massacre, China now has ten inscriptions on the Memory of the World Register.
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