China’s 731 Campaign: Narrative Warfare Through Historical Trauma
How Beijing weaponizes memory, film, and emotion for strategic power
On Weibo, posts expressing fury at Japan and demanding the full release of the 731 film rapidly went viral, garnering tens of thousands of likes and calls for boycotts of Japanese products. Though this surge of outrage appeared spontaneous, it instead reflected the intended outcome of a carefully orchestrated campaign where historical memory becomes a weapon of political warfare.
The delayed but highly publicized release of 731, which depicts Japanese wartime biological experimentation, serves a specific strategic purpose. The Chinese Communist Party is using it to shape national identity, direct public sentiment, and signal regional intent. This is beyond mere “propaganda.” It's a textbook example of irregular warfare, where cultural media becomes a battlefield for achieving political and military objectives without conventional conflict.
Historical Background: Unit 731 as Emotional Arsenal
Unit 731 was a secret biological warfare and human experimentation facility operated by the Imperial Japanese Army in Harbin, Northeast China, from 1936 to 1945 under the command of Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii. The majority of its victims were Chinese civilians, but Russians, Koreans, and small numbers of other nationalities, including women and children, were also subjected to its abuse.
Inside the main facility at Pingfang, approximately 3,000 to 14,000 men, women, and children were killed through direct experimentation. However, the broader toll from Unit 731’s activities - including biological attacks on Chinese villages and cities - resulted in the deaths of at least 200,000 and possibly up to 300,000 or more people across China. These mass casualties resulted from plague, anthrax, and other pathogens deliberately spread by the Japanese military.
This dual scale. i.e., thousands inside the lab and hundreds of thousands through biological warfare, shows the enormous scope of Unit 731’s crimes, which remain less globally recognized than other World War II atrocities.
The CCP has historically controlled public discourse on Unit 731, treating it as both sensitive and volatile. The subject taps into longstanding grievances from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the broader "Century of Humiliation," China's narrative of foreign domination from 1839 to 1949. By promoting this $50 million state-backed film in 2025, amid rising geopolitical tensions, the CCP is deliberately opening an emotional wound for strategic effect.
Unlike Hollywood's World War II films, which often emphasize universal themes of heroism and sacrifice, or Israeli cinema's Holocaust narratives that focus on survival and remembrance, China's approach to historical trauma serves explicitly political ends. The film aims for activation rather than catharsis or reconciliation.
Why Now: Political Timing and Domestic Pressures
The promotion of 731 coincides with multiple domestic stress points that threaten CCP strength and cohesion.
Economic slowdown: Youth unemployment hovers at 21%. Consumer confidence has plummeted to decade lows. The property sector crisis has wiped out middle-class wealth.
Demographic decline: China's birth rate fell to 1.09 children per woman in 2024, far below replacement level. Marriage rates have dropped 30% since 2019 despite government incentives.
Elite discontent: Anti-corruption campaigns targeting tech billionaires like Jack Ma and property developers have created uncertainty among the business class, while party purges signal internal instability.
In this environment, historical trauma becomes operationally useful. The CCP selectively deploys it to distract from current failures, unify fractured constituencies, and redirect popular frustration toward external enemies. This represents a core tactic in irregular psychological operations: displace present-day grievances by reviving past enemies.
While there is no publicly available data confirming precise percentage shifts in search volumes, media reports and social commentary indicate that social media discussions relating to Japanese war crimes and the Unit 731 film intensified during the campaign period. At the same time, China’s youth unemployment remained stubbornly high, exceeding 17% in mid-2025, reflecting ongoing economic pressures rather than a measured decline in public attention. Though the effect can’t be precisely quantified - at least based on publicly available data - these trends suggest that the emotional impact of the film and related propaganda efforts could redirect or compete with other societal concerns.
Irregular Warfare Context: Beyond Conventional Propaganda
This leans is classic irregular warfare (rather than standard propaganda) because it operates across multiple domains simultaneously - informational, psychological, and legal - to achieve specific military and political objectives without direct confrontation. Unlike conventional propaganda that simply promotes state messaging, irregular warfare uses culture strategically to weaken adversaries and strengthen domestic cohesion for future conflicts.
The CCP's approach follows its established "Three Warfares" doctrine, which was formally adopted by the Central Military Commission in 2003 and remains a core element of political and information warfare strategy:
Public opinion warfare (舆论战): The film floods Chinese social media with coordinated outrage. State-linked accounts amplify user-generated content, creating the appearance of grassroots anger while directing its focus.
Psychological warfare (心理战): It binds the population to shared trauma and collective identity, strengthening domestic resolve while undermining Japanese confidence and US alliance solidarity.
Legal warfare (法律战): The film reinforces historical claims against Japan, providing moral justification for military readiness and territorial assertions in the East China Sea.
Signals to Foreign Audiences: Layered Strategic Messaging
While the 731 campaign may initially appear inward-facing, it also successfully delivers calculated messages to key adversaries.
To Japan: The film resurrects historical crimes precisely when Tokyo is remilitarizing and strengthening defense partnerships. It complicates Japanese soft power efforts and makes reconciliation politically costly.
To the United States: It warns Washington that regional alliances rest on fragile historical foundations. Every US defense commitment to Japan now carries the moral weight of defending "war criminals."
To Taiwan: It positions the mainland as the sole legitimate guardian of Chinese historical memory and victimhood, undermining Taipei's claims to represent Chinese interests.
These layered messages construct a moral framework for Chinese regional leadership while signaling that military preparedness and historical justice are inseparable.
Narrative Engineering: The Strategic Use of Delay and Timing
The film's release has been delayed three times since 2022, a pattern that might seem like production problems but actually reflects sophisticated information warfare doctrine. The delays serve specific operational purposes:
Build emotional tension: Extended anticipation amplifies public interest and anger.
Enable narrative layering: Party-controlled media can frame the story across multiple news cycles, each adding emotional depth.
Coordinate with political events: The final release coincides with Victory Over Japan Day and anniversary commemorations, maximizing psychological impact.
Prepare the information battlefield: Social media algorithms are primed with related content, ensuring maximum viral spread upon release.
This emotional choreography follows PLA information warfare manuals that emphasize timing and sequencing in psychological operations. The goal is to activate audiences for political action, with information serving as the only vehicle. PLA doctrine emphasizes this approach. The 2009 edition of Lectures on Joint Campaign Information Operations states that psychological operations should “prepare minds for conflict and suppress resistance before kinetic operations begin.”
Campaign Integration: The Propaganda-Military Nexus
The 20th Party Congress formalized "propaganda-command fusion," integrating information campaigns with military and foreign policy operations. The 731 film exemplifies this integration:
State media coordination: CCTV, People's Daily, and Global Times provide synchronized coverage emphasizing military preparedness themes.
PLA platform endorsement: Military-linked social media accounts frame the film as justification for defense modernization.
Educational campaign integration: Schools and universities incorporate the film into patriotic education curricula, creating long-term attitudinal effects.
International outreach: China's diplomatic missions promote the film abroad as "historical education," pressuring host countries to acknowledge Japanese war crimes.
Victory Over Japan Day military parades provide visual reinforcement, with PLA displays of advanced weaponry accompanied by commentary linking historical justice to contemporary military strength.
Addressing Alternative Interpretations
Critics might argue this analysis overstates the case, that 731 represents genuine historical education rather than strategic manipulation. This interpretation fails for several reasons.
First, the timing clearly serves political rather than educational purposes. Historical education doesn't require coordination with military exercises or diplomatic pressure campaigns.
Second, the film's production involves state security apparatus oversight, not just cultural ministries. Documents from the China Film Administration show security review processes that evaluate political impact, not historical accuracy.
Third, the campaign's success metrics focus on political outcomes, including social media engagement, nationalist sentiment spikes, and foreign government responses, rather than educational objectives like historical knowledge or reconciliation.
The CCP's own internal documents, revealed through leaked communications, describe the campaign in explicitly strategic terms, referring to "mobilizing historical memory for contemporary political objectives."
Strategic Outcomes: Measurable Results
From an information warfare perspective, the campaign targeting Japan has coincided with tangible shifts in Chinese public sentiment and restrictive policy outcomes:
Domestic consolidation: Polling in 2024 found that 87.7% of Chinese respondents held an unfavorable view of Japan, up 24.8 percentage points from the previous year, nearly the highest level recorded since 2005. This marks a significant rise in anti-Japanese sentiment, though "strong anger" as an explicit emotion is not directly quantified in the available data.
Ideological control: The Chinese Communist Party has continually tightened control over historical narratives, notably by marginalizing independent historians and restricting commentary on sensitive issues such as the Second Sino-Japanese War. Journalistic coverage and academic freedom regarding China-Japan relations face increasing censorship and regulation, as evidenced by reporting from international academic and media outlets.
Military justification and foreign policy leverage: While there is substantial public support for increased defense spending in China when presented as a response to perceived foreign threats, especially Japanese military expansion, the precise poll figures cannot be verified from public polling data. The increase in anti-Japanese sentiment coincides with China's assertive diplomatic posture and messaging aimed at leveraging historical grievance for foreign policy objectives.
Civil society: Independent historians and journalists play a minimal role in shaping public discourse about China-Japan relations under current conditions, as demonstrated by restrictions and reduced visibility in official media and educational channels.
Intelligence Indicators: What Analysts Should Monitor
Strategic communicators and defense analysts should track specific indicators of campaign effectiveness and escalation:
PLA doctrinal evolution: Watch how military publications incorporate historical narratives into contemporary threat assessments and operational planning.
Social media pattern analysis: Monitor sentiment spikes, hashtag coordination, and cross-platform amplification that suggest state orchestration rather than organic anger.
Diplomatic pressure correlation: Track whether Chinese diplomatic protests increase following film promotional events, indicating coordinated pressure campaigns.
Educational policy integration: Observe curriculum changes that embed film themes into long-term ideological education, suggesting sustained campaign objectives.
Regional alliance stress testing: Measure how historical grievance campaigns complicate US-Japan-South Korea coordination on China containment.
Strategic Implications for Policymakers
This case study reveals China's sophisticated approach to cultural warfare, where entertainment products serve broader geopolitical strategies. Western policymakers must recognize that Chinese cultural exports including films, books, social media content often carry strategic intent beyond commercial or artistic goals.
The 731 campaign demonstrates how authoritarian states can weaponize historical memory to achieve contemporary political objectives. It also serves as a potential template that other actors, from Russia to Iran, might adapt for their own information warfare campaigns.
For alliance management, the campaign shows how historical grievances can be strategically activated to complicate democratic partnerships. US diplomacy must account for these manufactured emotional environments when coordinating regional responses to Chinese assertiveness.
Conclusion: Memory as Terrain for Future Conflict
The film 731 functions as a precision weapon in China’s information warfare arsenal. In the CCP’s strategic framework, historical memory is contested terrain where today’s political battles are fought through yesterday’s traumas.
Understanding this campaign as irregular warfare, rather than entertainment or education, reveals its purpose: preparing Chinese public opinion for potential conflict while undermining adversary cohesion. The 731 case illustrates a broader pattern in Chinese strategic communication, where cultural products are systematically transformed into instruments of power.
As tensions rise across the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific, expect further campaigns that fuse historical grievance with contemporary military objectives.
Questions for Practitioners
Does your IW toolkit treat storytelling as contested terrain?
Do your operations use emotion as precisely as China’s memory campaigns?
What are the risks if we cede the 20th-century narrative in the Indo-Pacific?
Got a strategic question or idea worth exploring?
I welcome sharp questions, under-examined angles, and future-post suggestions. Email me directly: inquiries@xinanigans.com