China holds low-key Nanjing Massacre memorial despite Japan tensions

13/12/2025 13:13

China held a low-key memorial ceremony on Saturday for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with President Xi Jinping not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan.



Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last month that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Chinese-claimed Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan.



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



A post-World War Two Allied tribunal put the death toll in the eastern city of Nanjing at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars have denied a massacre took place at all.



At Saturday's ceremony being held at the national memorial centre in Nanjing, Shi Taifeng, head of the ruling Communist Party's powerful organisation department, referenced Xi's speech at a military parade in Beijing in September marking 80 years since the end of World War Two.



But Shi's remarks were far less combative than recent rhetoric from Chinese government officials.



"History has fully demonstrated that the Chinese nation is a great nation that fears no power and stands on its own feet," he said.