China’s military mouthpiece warned on Friday that provocative actions by right-wing Japanese politicians risked plunging Asia into peril, as Beijing prepared to mark the 88th anniversary of the Nanking massacre amid heightened tensions with Tokyo.
PLA Daily published the commentary as sirens are poised to wail across Nanjing, the capital of eastern Jiangsu province, at 10.01am on Saturday for the national memorial ceremony led by the Central Committee and the State Council.
Introduced by China’s top legislature in 2014, the commemoration day has been a source of bitter grievance in China about wartime history.
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According to China’s official estimate, more than 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed in the six weeks after Japanese troops entered Nanking, now called Nanjing, on December 13, 1937. Japan disputes the number of fatalities.
In the commentary titled “Never Allow the Tragedies of History to Repeat Themselves”, author Xu Yizhen decried Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s November 7 remarks to Japan’s parliament suggesting a Taiwan contingency could be a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan as a blatant historical inversion that revived the spectre of militarism.
Xu said the Japanese leader had “openly turned back the wheel of history: first by absurdly claiming that a Taiwan contingency could constitute an existential crisis for Japan and then by trying to stir up” the notion of the island’s undetermined status.