China yesterday hit back at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's decision to forgo a formal apology for his country's wartime actions during a landmark address to the US Congress. "We urge the Japanese government leader to adopt a responsible attitude towards history," foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said. In his speech on Wednesday, instead of offering a formal apology, Abe said he felt "repentance" towards US war dead. He also made no mention of "comfort women", the Japanese euphemism for thousands of Asian women forced into prostitution at Japanese military brothers in the second world war. Hong said Abe should "honour statements and commitments that face up to and express deep reflection on history, including the Murayama Statement". He was referring to the 1995 apology by then-prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, which expressed his "heartfelt apology" for Japan's role in the war. Da Zhigang, a Japanese affairs expert at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, said Abe's remarks were unlikely to push Sino-Japanese ties back to the chill of 2013, when Beijing named Abe an "unwelcome person" after his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which houses war criminals. But he added, "It will add difficulty to the slightly improved ties." Da said Beijing would be upset by such rhetoric, and that it would weigh on bilateral relations in the long term. "Future Sino-Japanese relations would be somewhat like confrontation yet conciliation, competition yet cooperation and dispute yet friendliness," he said. Two of Japan's other neighbours, South and North Korea, also condemned Abe for distorting history. "It is very regrettable that Japanese Prime Minister Abe's speech at the US Congress … lacked a sincere apology," the South Korean foreign ministry said. It said Japan missed a golden chance to foster a fresh spirit of "true reconciliation" with its neighbours. A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said Abe's failure to offer a proper apology was an "intolerable" insult to the women who had suffered. Historians estimate that around 200,000 Asian women, mainly from the Korean peninsula, were forced to work in Japanese military brothels. Abe's failure to apologise came just a week after he met President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a summit in Indonesia, a meeting seen as a signal of a continued slight warming in relations that had been seriously soured by the nations' East China Sea dispute in 2013. Kou Chien-wu, director of the Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies in Taipei, said: "Sino-Japanese relations have always been locked in an 'up-and-down pattern' due to their long-running territorial and historical disputes. "Even now, with Beijing finding Abe's remarks unacceptable, other than issuing statements or letting its people condemn him, Beijing is unlikely to allow bilateral relations to deteriorate irrecoverably because the next step of further deterioration would be war, and this is something Beijing does not want." Additional reporting by Kyoto, Agence France-Presse and Reuters