The Rape of Nanjing was not only one of the most horrid and tragic moments of twentieth-century Chinese history, but may very well be remembered as an incident ranking "among the most brutal in modern warfare". Although the incident was largely marginalized in the west until the 1997 publication of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking and consistently underplayed in China for political reasons, it was not until the mid-eighties, when the Nanjing Massacre suddenly began to reenter the Chinese consciousness. In terms of narrative and structure, the film bears a deep artistic debt to Xie Jin model of melodrama, a mid-eighties cinematic form that has been described as dwelling "excessively on innocent victims' traumatic experiences of political persecution so as to invoke in the viewer an acute sense of injustice as well as profound feeling of sympathy". Even in arena of spoken language, Don't Cry, Nanking presents a much broader and genuine representation of linguistic heteroglossia of wartime Nanjing.