Nanjing Massacre Survivor Guo Xiulan Dies at 94
Guo Xiulan, a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, died at her home in Nanjing at around 10 a.m. on 7 October, the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders announced. She was 94. With her death, the number of officially registered living survivors of the atrocity has fallen to just 20, Xinhua reported.
Born in Nanjing in 1932, Guo was only five years old when Japanese troops occupied the city in December 1937 and began the mass killings that would claim an estimated 300,000 lives. Her death, on the eve of what would have been her 94th birthday, marks another step toward the day when no first-hand witnesses remain.
A Childhood Witness
Guo’s testimony, preserved in interviews before her death, recounts the massacre through the eyes of a small child. Speaking of the day the soldiers came, she recalled how residents of her alley fled in panic, and how her parents took their three daughters and roughly a hundred neighbors into an air-raid shelter near present-day Zhanglongqiao.
“In 1937, after the Japanese army entered the city, my parents took us three sisters and hid in a cave together with our neighbors,” Guo remembered. “The Japanese soldiers stood at the entrance of the cave and strafed with a machine gun. My parents and youngest sister all died; only my second sister and I survived.”
A more detailed account, reported by Beijing News citing CCTV News, describes how the cries of children drew the attention of three Japanese soldiers, who followed the sound to the shelter and opened fire into the crowd within. Guo lay motionless on the ground until the soldiers, seeing no movement, finally left.
“It was then that I learned my parents and youngest sister had all been killed,” she said. “My youngest sister died in our mother’s arms. Father held mother in his arms.”
A Registry Running Out
The Nanjing Massacre refers to the mass killings and atrocities carried out by Japanese forces over roughly six weeks after they captured Nanjing, then China’s capital, in December 1937. China’s official position, and the finding of the post-war Far East International Military Tribunal, holds that around 300,000 people were killed.
The survivors have long been regarded as living “human evidence” of the atrocity. But that evidence is fading quickly. The official registry maintained by the Nanjing Association for Aid to Victims of Japanese Invaders and Transmission of Nanjing Massacre Historical Memory has contracted sharply in recent years: 32 survivors remained as of December 2024, falling to 24 a year later, and to 21 in March 2026 after the death of 101-year-old survivor Guan Shunhua.
Guo’s death brings the count to 20 — a decline of more than a third in under two years.
Preserving Memory as Witnesses Vanish
Because first-hand witnesses are dying out, the Memorial Hall and the survivors’ association have created a corps of “historical memory inheritors” — often the descendants of survivors — to carry their testimony forward. As of December 2024, there were 32 such inheritors, matching the then-32 surviving witnesses. The Memorial Hall also displays a wall of portraits of 100 elderly survivors, an effort to preserve human faces and stories as the number of the living shrinks.
The issue carries weight beyond commemoration. Denial or trivialization of the Nanjing Massacre remains an acutely sensitive subject in China-Japan relations, and Beijing treats survivors’ testimony as irreplaceable evidence against revisionist accounts. Each survivor’s death is therefore a matter of historical as well as human significance.
What’s Next
Guo’s passing comes ahead of December 2026, which will mark the 89th anniversary of the massacre. The milestone is likely to sharpen attention on the future of survivor testimony and the institutions built to preserve it.
With only 20 registered survivors left — nearly all of them very elderly — the coming years will test whether the memory-transmission system now being built can carry the weight once borne by the witnesses themselves.