BEIJING police have refused two female war victims permission to demonstrate outside the Japanese Embassy, saying their demonstration might be manipulated by 'bad elements'.
The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, demanded Tokyo resolve the comfort women issue as Xinhua (the New China News Agency) lashed out at Japan's failure to apologise for its wartime atrocities.
Zhang Tingqi, one of the protest applicants, said police told her yesterday that, although they understood the war victims' feelings, they could not give approval in case the protest was used to stir up disturbances.
Ms Zhang, 69, and Yin Zhengmei, 66, planned to stage the demonstration with 10 to 20 other war victims outside the embassy in Beijing tomorrow after the Japanese parliament stopped short of making a full apology last week.
They demanded Tokyo apologise for its war aggression in China and atrocities done to the Chinese people.
'Originally I thought it would be something very simple . . . We just wanted to carry out a simple protest outside the embassy,' Ms Zhang said in Beijing.
She said they had yet to decide what to do next.