70th anniversary of wartime massacre comes amid improved Sino-Japanese ties
The mainland will mark the 70th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre tomorrow, but a recent warming in relations between China and Japan appears to have prompted Beijing to stifle public protests.
Nanjing - known as Nanking before the Sino-Japanese war - will remember the event, when Japanese soldiers entered the city on December 13, 1937, with a ceremony and the opening of an expanded Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, local officials said.
For nearly seven weeks, Japanese troops raped and killed the civilian population and looted and burned the city, historian Jonathan Spence wrote in The Search for Modern China. Beijing puts the number of victims at 300,000.
Shanghai's Oriental Morning Post reported that the remains of a further 19 victims had been unearthed on the site of the memorial last year.
'This is the best counter-attack to those Japanese rightist forces who deny history. Faced with these remains, no one is capable of denying the opinion of history,' it quoted the head of the memorial, Zhu Chengshan, as saying.
The renovation of the memorial, specifically for the 70th anniversary, started in December 2005. Officials say the project will increase the total area of structures on the site by about nine times.