China plans to escalate propaganda war on Japan

NANJING, China —China has stepped up its efforts to embarrass Japan on the world stage with plans for a new holiday to mark the Nanjing massacre in an attempt to make the Second World War a central theme of a presidential trip to Germany next month.

Beijing is using the media to contrast Germany’s atonement with what Beijing sees as Japan’s failure to apologize adequately for its role in the war and its imperialist expansion, including the 1937 massacre.

Last month, journalists were taken to the site of a Japanese prisonerof-war camp in northeast China and, last week, officials guided journalists around Nanjing, the former Chinese capital. Beijing claims that about 300,000 people were killed there following the Japanese invasion in 1937. An international postwar tribunal put the number at 142,000.

Xu Jingjing, a museum guide, ushered journalists through a dimly lit exhibition filled with gruesome blackand-white images of burned and mutilated bodies titled A Human Holocaust.

“We’ve looked at the mass massacres, now let’s look at the random killings,” she said, moving into a room featuring a photograph of a Chinese man who had been decapitated by the Japanese before having a cigarette stuffed into his mouth.

Xi Jinping, China’s president, is due to visit Germany late next month as part of a European tour. The trip has yet to be formally announced.

Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have deteriorated rapidly in recent months both because of escalating frictions over disputed islands in the East China Sea and the toxic legacy of Japan’s military exploits in 1930s China.