China said on Friday that Japan’s World War-II violence is more worthy of remembrance than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, ahead of a historic visit by U.S. President Barack Obama. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that the massacre of civilians by Japanese troops in the city of Nanjing deserved greater reflection.
“Hiroshima is worthy of attention. But even more so Nanjing should not be forgotten,” the ministry’s website cited him as saying. “Victims deserve sympathy, but perpetrators should never shirk their responsibility,” he told a huddle of reporters, state broadcaster CCTV showed.
China says 300,000 people died in a six-week spree of killing, rape and destruction after the Japanese military entered Nanjing in 1937, although some respected academics put the number lower. Historian Jonathan Spence, for example, estimates that 42,000 soldiers and citizens were killed and 20,000 women raped.
The state-run China Daily declared in an editorial on Thursday that the “atomic bombings of Japan were of its own making”. It accused present-day Japanese officials of “trying to portray Japan as the victim of World War II rather than one of its major perpetrators”.
