Mount Langya () is a mountain located in
Yi County,
Hebei
Hebei or , (; alternately Hopeh) is a northern province of China. Hebei is China's sixth most populous province, with over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. The province is 96% Han Chinese, 3% Manchu, 0.8% Hui, and 0 ...
province about southwest of Beijing.
Five heroes of Mount Langya
According to the mythology of the
Communist Party of China
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil ...
, the "five heroes of Mount Langya" () were five men who fought the
Imperial Japanese Army
The was the official ground-based armed force of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945. It was controlled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of the Army, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emperor o ...
atop Mount Langya during the
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) or War of Resistance (Chinese term) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Th ...
. They supposedly killed dozens and then committed suicide by throwing themselves off the top of the mountain to escape capture by the Japanese. Two of the Chinese soldiers survived, but all others perished. The story is celebrated in China; a Chinese court has written that the heroes and their story reflect "the national sentiments, historical memories and the national spirit" and are important "sources and components of modern China’s socialist core values".
The story has been made into a movie.
Myth disputed
Hong Zhenkuai, a Chinese historian, has disputed the myth, saying that the five men had slipped rather than jumped, and that they had not in fact killed any Japanese soldiers. Jiang Keshi, a professor at
Okayama University in
Japan, found in a search of Japanese military records that no soldiers had died in their encounter with the five on Langya.
Publishing doubts about the historicity of the official account of the story has been implicated in the closure of the magazine ''
Yanhuang Chunqiu
''Yanhuang Chunqiu'' (), sometimes translated as ''China Through the Ages'', was a monthly journal in the People's Republic of China commonly identified as liberal and reformist. It was started in 1991, with the support of Xiao Ke, a liberal gener ...
'' in 2016.
A court decided in 2016 that the historian behind the article, Hong Zhenkuai, had defamed the heroes and was ordered to publicly apologize.
Gallery
See also
*
Mount Langya (Anhui)
References
External links
Mountains of Hebei
Baoding
Propaganda in China
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