Chinese envoy compares Japan to Harry Potter villain Voldemort

China's ambassador to Britain has invoked Lord Voldemort, the villain of JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, in a diplomatic stand-off between Beijing and Tokyo over the Japanese prime minister's visit to a controversial war shrine.

"In the Harry Potter story, the dark wizard Voldemort dies because the seven horcruxes, which contain parts of his soul, have been destroyed," Ambassador Liu Xiaoming wrote on Wednesday in an op-ed in The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

"If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of that nation's soul," he said.

Liu's op-ed comes amid the tensions between China and Japan over Shinzo Abe's visit to the shrine last week.

He became the first Japanese head of government since 2006 to pay respects at Yasukuni, which honours 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including 14 indicted class A war criminals from the second world war. Japanese cabinet minister Yoshitaka Shindo followed up with a visit of his own on Wednesday.

Abe said last week the goal of his shrine visit was "to pledge and determine that never again will people suffer in war", but the site is seen elsewhere as a reminder of Japan's 20th century aggression against China and other Asian nations.