Rape of Nanking to be made into film for 70th anniversary

China is to make a major film about the Rape of Nanking in 1937, when tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were massacred by Japanese invaders. The announcement yesterday comes as anti-Japanese sentiment rides high before Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to a controversial war shrine.

Based on Iris Chang's best-seller The Rape of Nanking, the film will feature the experiences of a Chinese family during the massacre in the wartime capital, now called Nanjing. It will also show how a group of Westerners, including the German engineer and card-carrying Nazi John Rabe and the American educator Minnie Vautrin, set up safety zones and helped save more than 250,000 people.

"We hope we can make the film a classic on a massacre in the Second World War, just like Schindler's List about the miserable experience of Jewish people during the war," the producer, Gerald Green, told the Xinhua news agency.

The stars of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh, are tipped to appear in the movie which is scheduled to start filming within weeks and would debut in China next year, before the 70th anniversary of the incident.

China says that 300,000 Chinese people were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing, but the 1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunal found that Japanese troops killed 155,000 people.

Memories of the massacre run deep in China and it remains an obstacle to healthy relations between the Asian giants. Beijing believes that Japan has not done enough to atone for its war crimes.