BEIJING – A Chinese movie on the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious Unit 731 was not screened Thursday as scheduled, fueling speculation that its release has been put off or canceled in a possible move by Beijing to avoid fanning anti-Japan sentiment and damaging bilateral relations.
The release date of the film on local movie ticket purchase apps has been changed from July 31 to 2025, while millions of people online have expressed their interest in the film about the unit, which according to historians conducted biological and chemical warfare research in China during World War II.
The movie’s production company has not explained why the work failed to hit screens as originally planned. Some people have expressed disappointment at the failure to screen it in online posts, saying “history should not be forgotten.”
A Beijing theater only showed a preview of the movie, with a female employee saying the complete film data has yet to arrive and that it is rumored that it may be released around September.
A male employee of another movie theater said the film was not screened “because of problems with the production company” and that the release may have been canceled.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Sino-Japanese conflict, which Beijing calls the 1937-1945 War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. China plans to hold a military parade in the capital’s Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3 to commemorate the war anniversary.
Set in China’s northeastern region, the movie conveys an anti-war message and aims to “reveal the crimes” of Unit 731 through a focus on ordinary individuals, according to media reports.
The film was made with the cooperation of an exhibition hall dedicated to the unit in Harbin in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang as well as local publicity departments of the ruling Communist Party.
The unit’s research is believed to have included lethal experimentation and testing on humans. Prisoners of war were secretly experimented upon to develop, among other things, plague and cholera-based biological weapons, according to historians.
Some people speculated the Unit 731 movie was not released as scheduled due to concerns that it could have a negative impact on Sino-Japanese relations as well as child viewers affected by scenes of cruelty.
Movie industry officials have pointed out that a Chinese film on the massacre in Nanjing committed by Japanese troops in 1937 hit screens last Friday and that the release of the Unit 731 movie may have been aborted to avoid the release of works about similar war themes.
The Japanese government says it has not found any evidence confirming the unit conducted experiments on human subjects.
In 1997, Japan’s Supreme Court, in a ruling concerning state screeners’ objection to a history textbook’s description of the unit’s actions in China, said “the view had been established within academic circles to an undeniable extent that Unit 731 had killed many Chinese people through biological experiments.”
