China marks Nanjing Massacre's 80th anniversary but Xi silent

[BEIJING] China marked the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre on Wednesday with a call to work with Japan for peace, but President Xi Jinping kept a low profile and left the public remarks to another senior official.

China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 massacre in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in its then capital.

A postwar Allied tribunal put the death toll at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars deny a massacre took place at all.

Ties between China and Japan, the world's second- and third-largest economies, have been plagued by a long-running territorial dispute over a cluster of East China Sea islets and suspicion in China about efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to amend Japan's pacifist constitution.

However, the two countries have sought to get relations back on track, and Mr Abe and Mr Xi met last month on the sidelines of a regional summit in Vietnam.

Speaking at a memorial in the eastern city of Nanjing, Yu Zhengsheng, who heads a high profile but largely ceremonial advisory body to China's parliament, said China and Japan were neighbours with deep historic ties.

China will deepen relations with all its neighbours, including Japan, on the basis of amity, sincerity and friendship, Mr Yu said, in comments carried live on state television.

"China and Japan must act on the basis of both their people's basic interests, correctly grasp the broad direction of peaceful and friendly cooperation, take history as a mirror, face the future and pass on friendship down the generations," Mr Yu said.

A sombre Mr Xi, wearing a white flower in his lapel to symbolise mourning, stood in the audience but did not speak.

Doves to signify peace flew overhead once Mr Yu finished speaking.

It was the second time Mr Xi has attended the event since as the country marked its first national memorial day for the massacre in 2014. At that time he did speak, calling on China and Japan to set aside hatred and not allow the minority who led Japan to war to affect relations now.

REUTERS