China considers submitting Nanking massacre papers to Unesco heritage project
Beijing considers countering Japanese bid to send kamikazi letters to heritage programme with documents from the 'rape of Nanking'
China says it might counter a Japanese bid to submit wartime letters by suicide pilots to a UN heritage programme with documents of Japanese atrocities during the Nanking massacre.
Earlier this month, Minamikyushu city in southern Japan, the site of a base where young kamikaze pilots trained for their final missions, applied to list pilots' final letters to their families with the Memory of the World Programme of the UN cultural organisation, Unesco.
Beijing's move was revealed to non-mainland journalists during a two-day tour - organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - to the former Chinese capital, which today uses the post-war pinyin spelling Nanjing . It was where defeated Chinese troops and residents were subjected to mass rape and slaughter after the Japanese invaded.
China and Japan are locked in an acrimonious dispute over a cluster of islands in the East China Sea known as the Diaoyus in China and Senkakus by Japan, which currently occupies them. Relations between Asia's two most powerful nations deteriorated further after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine war memorial in December and Naoki Hyakuta, an executive at Japan state broadcaster NHK, called accounts of the Nanking massacre propaganda.
Although the exact number of casualties is not known, China says 300,000 civilians and soldiers died in the six-week spree of rape, murders and destruction when the Japanese military entered the then capital on December 13, 1937, shortly after they attacked Shanghai.
We have to make the international community aware of the facts [of the massacre]
