Chinese students protest at Japan embassy in Seoul

Dozens of Chinese students, carrying banners and shouting slogans, protested outside Japan’s embassy in Seoul on Thursday to show their support for Beijing in a bitter territorial row with Tokyo.

The protest followed nationwide demonstrations in China in recent days over a set of disputed islands in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

“Diaoyu is China’s territory. Don’t invade our territory!” more than 40 protestors from a Seoul-based Chinese student association chanted outside the embassy in the South Korean capital.

The students were outnumbered nearly 3:1 by police who had circled the entrance to the Japanese mission with more than a dozen buses parked end-to-end to block access.

Efforts by the protestors to move closer to the embassy were quickly rebuffed and police sought to keep the slogan-shouting to a minimum, warning the students to follow “Korean rules in Korea”.

The disputed islands are controlled by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing and Taipei, and tensions peaked after the Japanese government bought three of them from their private owners.