Statue of Iris Chang at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre, Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu Province Photo: VCG

The parents of Chinese-American writer Iris Chang, who exposed the crimes of the notorious Nanjing Massacre, thanked her followers as she is being mourned with flowers and online condolences a week after the National Memorial Day on December 13 to commemorate the victims of the massacre in the city.

A video circulating online shows flowers continue to be sent to the Memorial Hall of Iris Chang in Huai'an, East China's Jiangsu Province. 

"Your blood is warmer than all of us," a person surnamed Li wrote on a card. Li ordered a bunch of flowers online and asked the delivery person to put it "under Zhang's statue" inside her memorial hall, a local newspaper reported.

There is also a reading craze on China's online book review platform Douban, where Chang's 1991 shocking book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II scored 9.6 out of 10.

Some reviews said it is a "description of hell" for the present. "The stories are so horrible that they are beyond words," a netizen posted on Douban on Tuesday.

There are readers that question the tally of 300,000 casualties as the number came from the records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal after WWII.

"Yet, although the number has been reassured and the facts in the book have been clear, there are some people that act arbitrarily, shamelessly and deliberately, to challenge the bottom line of us as Chinese," said another netizen on Monday.

The passionate reviews also refers to another incident that happened in the Shanghai Aurora College, where a teacher questioned the number of victims of the massacre.

A video of Song Gengyi, an instructor at the college, shows her giving a lecture where she openly says that the 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) were a fabrication and that there is no data to support the number either. 

The video soon went viral online and sparked netizens' anger who started to question whether Song can be called a qualified teacher if she is ignorant of Chinese history.

The college posted a statement on December 16, clarifying that the teacher who made the inappropriate remarks had been fired as her remarks had caused negative social impact.  

Despite the decision to attempt to put down the fire, netizens still commented on Sina Weibo that they are afraid since Song has an important role an instructor who teaches journalists that is supposed to educate people by delivering the right ideological values. 

"She missed it but we do not want our kids to misinterpret the Chinese history, no," posted a netizen.   

In 2004, Chang committed suicide in her car in the US.

Though public opinion once linked the young writer's death to the cruel and dark historical materials she encountered while writing her book, Chang's mother later disregarded the claims in her memoirs dedicated to her daughter, saying that "Iris had always thought that writing this book was a good thing, and she was very proud of it."