Chinese look back in anger at Japan's wartime atrocities

The girl was one of an estimated 35 million Chinese who were killed or wounded in eight years of fighting. Sixty years after the war ended, outrage at Japanese atrocities remains as fresh as ever in China.

Chinese resentment at Japan's perceived failure to apologise for those atrocities has combined with Tokyo's concerns over increased Chinese military spending to ensure the countries are no closer to reconciliation.

Speaking at a memorial to China's war dead yesterday, President Hu Jintao urged his countrymen to "keep history firmly in mind and never forget the past." He needn't have bothered.

Mr Li is one of hundreds of thousands to visit to the "Great Victory" exhibition at the Museum Of The War Of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing. The attraction is a harrowing collection of 800 photos documenting the occupation.

Many of them show, in grisly detail, such infamous events as the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, when 300,000 civilians were massacred and tens of thousands of women were raped, as well as the Japanese germ warfare programme in China, which resulted in the deaths of up to 250,000.

"I have different feelings to the young people who come here to see the photos. They look at them quickly because they didn't experience what is in the photos. But I did," said Mr Li, who's originally from Hebei Province.

A staggering 400,000 people have visited the exhibition in the month since it opened. Located on the outskirts of south-west Beijing and just a few hundred yards from the Marco Polo Bridge, where the first shots in the Sino-Japanese War were fired on 7 July 1937, the museum was packed with people of all ages when The Independent visited it. Similar exhibitions have opened in cities across China, from Chongqing in the west to Hong Kong in the south, as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations of the end of the war.

"I feel angry about the Japanese and their extremely cruel behaviour towards the Chinese people," said a 23-year-old primary school teacher visiting the exhibition with her colleagues. "The Japanese should have done a lot more to apologise for what they did." It's a sentiment that was repeated by everyone I spoke to, from the students posing for photos with a replica Red Army flag to Mr Li. "I don't like the Japanese doing things like changing their history books so they don't tell the truth about the war," he said.

It was the publication of a revisionist history textbook by the right-wing Japanese Society For History Textbook Reform earlier this year that prompted widespread anti-Japan protests in China in late March and early April. The textbook, which was adopted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education for use in junior high schools two weeks ago, glosses over the Nanjing Massacre and fails to mention the 200,000-odd "comfort women" from China and Korea who were forced to work as prostitutes for the Japanese Army.

The repeated visits of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours war criminals as well as Japan's war dead, have also enraged the Chinese, as has Japan's refusal to pay compensation to those Chinese who were victims of Japan's germ warfare program, or who were transported to Japan to work as forced labour. the Chinese government set up a fund on 5 August to help survivors continue their battle for compensation in the Japanese courts.

In recent weeks, Japan has questioned China's increased spending on its armed forces, up 16.5 per cent from last year, while the Chinese have focused their attention on the East China Sea, where they are disputing Japan's claims to the Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu Islands to the Chinese, and both countries are drilling for oil and natural gas. The prospect of a Sino-Japanese confrontation over energy reserves is a frightening one, but few people at the "Great Victory" exhibition were keen on another war. "I support peace with the Japanese people," said Mr Li. "At my age, I would not like to see war again."