CHINA: Sino-Japanese tensions ratcheted up a notch yesterday as China called for United Nations protection for the site of a Japanese second World War germ warfare facility and a Tokyo court denied claims for compensation by victims of wartime atrocities.
The row over Japan's war record overshadowed a small conciliatory gesture, when China offered to repair Japan's Beijing embassy damaged in three successive weekends of protests, which also hit Shanghai, Hangzhou and other major centres.
China will seek Unesco World Heritage protection for the ruins of a Japanese germ warfare centre, known as Unit 731, operated during the second World War. The Chinese compare the unit to the experimental facilities run by the Nazis where thousands of Jews and other concentration camp inmates were killed.
The call to give the site Unesco status came as a Japanese court rejected a lawsuit by 10 Chinese plaintiffs seeking compensation for wartime atrocities.
The plaintiffs included eight victims or relatives of victims of Unit 731. The ruling was in line with previous court decisions.
The Chinese plaintiffs had been trying to overturn a previous ruling which rejected their demand for 100 million yen, around €714,000. But Japanese courts insist any wartime compensation issues were resolved by treaties after the war.
Located south of Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang province, Unit 731's laboratories were used for experiments on humans to develop biological weapons, such as bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera.
At least 3,000 people, including Chinese civilians, Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, were killed in germ warfare experiments at the facility between 1939 and 1945, according to the official news agency Xinhua.
Another 200,000 Chinese were killed by biological weapons produced by Unit 731.
Jin Chengmin, a researcher with the Harbin Municipal Academy of Social Sciences, told the China Daily newspaper that the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan were precedents for Unesco protection of war ruins.
"We will apply for World Heritage status to let more people in the world know the truth, which may serve to remind us of the barbarity of war," Wang Peng, curator of the 731 Exhibition Hall, said.
Officially, the Japanese government neither denies nor recognises what went on at Unit 731.
In 2002, a Japanese court recognised the unit's activities, but rejected a compensation call.
Unit 731 is high on a list of Chinese grievances about Japanese activities during its occupation of China from 1931 to 1945.
The list also includes the 1937 Nanjing massacre, when Beijing says 300,000 Chinese men, women and children were slaughtered by Japanese troops in the former Chinese capital. The 1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunal found Japanese troops killed 155,000 people, mainly women and children.
The recent publication of a revised Japanese history schoolbook, which Beijing says whitewashes Japan's wartime atrocities, became the focus of this anger and prompted three weekends of violent protests in Chinese cities, which included attacks on Japanese diplomatic missions.
The protesters are also opposed to Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and angry at annual visits by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honours war criminals among the dead.