On October 23, 2025, at 12:00 PM, Tong Zeng passed away due to illness at the age of 69. During his lifetime, he held many titles, including Chairman of Zhongxiang Investment Co., Ltd., former Associate Researcher at the China Research Center on Aging, former Director of the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation, and President of the China Civilian Association for Defending the Diaoyu Islands. However, he was most widely known as "the first person in China to seek compensation from Japan on behalf of civilians."

Thirty-five years ago, in 1990, Tong Zeng authored "The Inspiration from Europe's Demand for Victim Compensation for China," which was the first legal proposal asserting that Chinese civilian victims had the right to seek compensation from the Japanese government and corporations. This marked the beginning of legal actions by Chinese civilian victims seeking redress for Japanese war crimes during World War II. According to incomplete statistics, this decades-long legal movement has inspired tens of thousands of participants worldwide, including forced laborers, victims of the Japanese military's "comfort women" system, and victims of biological and chemical warfare, as well as over 300 Japanese legal professionals, historians, and civil group members, represented by Japanese lawyer Toshitaka Onodera. Among the many compensation cases Tong Zeng promoted, the 1995 lawsuit by Chinese laborers against Kajima Construction in Akita, Japan, was of landmark significance, as it was the first labor compensation lawsuit filed by Chinese civilian victims in a Japanese court. In the 2009 settlement of the Nishimatsu Construction Anno Power Station labor case, a Japanese company, for the first time, paid compensation to Chinese victimized laborers through court proceedings.

In 2016, Chinese laborers formally settled with Mitsubishi Materials—a historic event where a Japanese company collectively apologized and compensated Chinese victimized laborers for the first time post-war, regarded as a landmark case in China's civilian efforts to uphold historical justice. The suffering of war victims and the weight of historical justice are as heavy as boulders. From the moment he embarked on this cause until his departure from this world, Tong Zeng never witnessed a complete victory in court, yet he tirelessly and willingly shouldered the burden time and again. He once said that the significance of this lawsuit transcended compensation itself; it was "to make more people around the world aware of this deliberately downplayed bloody history." In his view, the evidence and precedents left in courts across nations are eternal wedges driven into the memory of history.

Tong Zeng, "the first person in China's civil society to claim compensation from Japan", has passed away; a review of those moments that moved the immovable boulderThe decades-long civilian struggle for compensation from the perpetrators has kept the issue of Japan's war responsibilities afloat, making it a focal point of public discourse. Kyodo News once described in an in-depth report that the civilian compensation movement promoted by Tong Zeng was "the largest post-war mass movement affecting Sino-Japanese relations." As we mourn the deceased, Phoenix News revisits the pivotal historical moments of Tong Zeng's advocacy for compensation.