NANJING, China, Dec 13 (Reuters) – China held a low-key memorial ceremony on Saturday for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with President Xi Jinping not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan.
Beijing has raged against Japan since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last month that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Chinese-claimed Taiwan could trigger a military response from Tokyo.
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 post-World War Two Allied tribunal put the death toll in the eastern city of Nanjing at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars have denied a massacre took place at all.
Speaking at the national memorial centre in Nanjing, Shi Taifeng, head of the ruling Communist Party’s powerful organisation department, noted the speech Xi gave at a military parade in Beijing in September marking 80 years since the end of World War Two.
“History has fully demonstrated that the Chinese nation is a great nation that fears no power and stands on its own feet,” Shi said.
He did not mention Takaichi but alluded to China’s previous claims that she is seeking to bring back Japan’s history of militarism.
“History has proven and will continue to prove that any attempt to revive militarism, challenge the postwar international order, or undermine world peace and stability will never be tolerated by all peace-loving and justice-seeking peoples around the world and is doomed to failure.”
China marked its first national memorial day for the massacre in 2014, where Xi spoke and called on China and Japan to set aside hatred and not allow the minority who led Japan to war to affect relations now.
Xi last attended the event in person in 2017 but did not deliver public remarks.
(Reporting by Reuters staff; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and William Mallard)
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