Xi absent for Nanjing ceremony
NANJING: China held a memorial ceremony yesterday for victims of the 1937 massacre committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, with President Xi Jinping skipping the event after attending last year, as the two countries have moved towards repairing their often-testy relations.
This year’s ceremony in the eastern Chinese city comes after China’s successful bid in October to include documents on the military rampage in the “Memory of the World” programme by Unesco, the UN cultural agency.
China last year designated Dec 13 as a national memorial day for the victims and held a state observance of the tragedy for the first time that Beijing says killed more than 300,000.
The previous ceremony was spotlighted internationally as Mr Xi delivered a speech saying that nobody can deny the atrocities, at a time when Sino-Japanese relations were still much more fragile than they are now.
However, in addition to Mr Xi, none of the others who sit on the Chinese ruling party’s seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s apex of power, participated in this year’s event.
Leading up to the service, coverage by Chinese official media was also low-key, amid a gradual-but-steady improvement in diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing.
The highest-ranking Chinese official at the ceremony to mark the 78th anniversary of the massacre was Li Jianguo, vicechairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
Citing Unesco’s recent inscription of a dossier on the widespread killings, Mr Li said “history is the best textbook” in his speech at the venue, where thousands of Chinese officials, veterans and schoolchildren were present.
Mr Li said the massacre has “world significance” as a lesson from the past.
“We have to resolutely oppose anyone who beautifies the war of aggression and any action or word that attempts to drive history backward,” Mr Li said.
But at the same, in line with what Mr Xi has been saying in recent months, the vice chairman said the two countries have witnessed great progress since the 1972 normalisation of diplomatic ties and that both should continue to promote friendly cooperation and contribute to world peace.
The Japanese army invaded China in the 1930s and the two Asian countries fought a full-scale war from 1937 to 1945 that ended with Japan’s defeat in World War II.
On Dec 13, 1937, Japanese forces took control of Nanjing, the Chinese capital at the time.
Japanese troops’ killing of a large number of Chinese civilians, rape of women and looting, in both the run-up to the city’s capture and the weeks that followed, remains one of the biggest sources of friction between the neighboring countries.
China this year has held a series of events to mark the 70th anniversary of what it calls its victory against Japan’s aggression, including a massive military parade in September in Beijing.