Kuwait Times

Sirens, doves as China marks 80 years since ‘Nanjing massacre’

China, Japan long at odds over wartime history Beijing, Tokyo seeking to get relations back on track

- conference: It was the second time Xi has attended the event since China marked its first national memorial day for the massacre in 2014. At that time, he called on China and Japan to set aside hatred and not allow the minority who led Japan to war to aff

NANJING: Sirens blared and thousands of doves were released as Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over a somber ceremony in Nanjing marking 80 years since the wartime massacre in the city by Japanese troops. Several thousand black-clad soldiers, civil servants and students with white flowers pinned to their jackets braved chilly temperatur­es at a monument to a dark World War Two chapter that still divides the two countries. But while vowing never to forget the “great catastroph­e” wrought by “Japanese militarism” in a speech to the mourners, a top Chinese official also stressed the need for the two rivals to move forward.

China marked the 80th anniversar­y with a call to work with Japan for peace, but President Xi Jinping kept a low profile and left the main public remarks to another senior official. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistent­ly reminds its people of the 1937 massacre in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital.

A postwar Allied tribunal put the death toll in the eastern city of Nanjing at 142,000, but some conservati­ve Japanese politician­s and scholars deny a massacre took place at all. Ties between China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-largest economies, have been plagued by a long-running territoria­l dispute over a cluster of East China Sea islets and suspicion in China about efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to amend Japan’s pacifist constituti­on. However the two countries have sought to get relations back on track, and Abe and Xi met last month on the sidelines of a regional summit in Vietnam.

Speaking at a memorial in Nanjing, Yu Zhengsheng, who heads a high-profile but largely ceremonial advisory body to China’s parliament, said China and Japan were neighbors with deep historic ties. China would deepen relations with all its neighbors, including Japan, on the basis of amity, sincerity and friendship, Yu said, in comments carried live on state television. “China and Japan must act on the basis of both their people’s basic interests, correctly grasp the broad direction of peaceful and friendly cooperatio­n, take history as a mirror, face the future and pass on friendship down the generation­s,” Yu said.

A somber Xi, wearing a white flower in his lapel to symbolize mourning, stood in the audience but did not speak. Doves to signify peace flew overhead after Yu finished speaking. Xi later met massacre survivors, the official Xinhua news agency said, telling them, “Lessons learned from the past can guide one in the future”. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who arrived in Beijing for a four-day visit, offered condolence­s to the victims in a speech to businessme­n, in what his office called the first such public mention of the massacre by a South Korean leader.

In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga spoke of the importance of looking to the future. “The leaders of Japan and China have agreed in past meetings to further improve relations and it is important, while cherishing this trend, to together show a future-oriented stance,” Suga told a regular news

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 ?? —AFP ?? NANJING: Doves are released during a memorial ceremony at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall on the second annual national day of remembranc­e to commemorat­e the 80th anniversar­y of the massacre in Nanjing yesterday.
—AFP NANJING: Doves are released during a memorial ceremony at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall on the second annual national day of remembranc­e to commemorat­e the 80th anniversar­y of the massacre in Nanjing yesterday.
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