China feels regret that
some Japanese make Japan's loans to China a sensitive issue, Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said in Beijing yesterday.
Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokesman Liu Jianchao [file photo] |
At a regular
press briefing, Liu said Japanese loans to China or Sino-Japanese capital
cooperation should be a positive element of the bilateral relations, and it will
do harm to both sides to make it "very sensitive" by some Japanese.
Liu said the Chinese side welcomes Japan's declaration to attach importance
to Sino-Japanese relations, but "attaching importance is not enough. We hope
they can take sincere actions for the improvement and development of bilateral
relations," he stressed.
Japan made a formal decision yesterday to end its freeze on the annual
disbursement of loans to China for fiscal 2005 through March, Kyodo News
reported.
The decision was made by a top decision-making panel on foreign aid strategy
comprising Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Foreign Minister Taro Aso
and other Cabinet ministers, reports said.
Koizumi told reporters that the decision had been made after an overall
assessment of the situation, adding that he "always attached importance" to
Sino-Japanese ties, Reuters reported.
Decisions on annual disbursement of aid loans to China are often made by
Cabinet ministers at year end. But the Japanese government delayed a decision on
the aid loans in March due to the deteriorated China-Japan relations over
Japanese leaders' repeated visits to a war shrine.
Emperor Akihito of Japan on Tuesday said Japan should remember the damage and
pain its militarist past caused its own people and Asian neighbors, and called
for more effort to ensure it never happens again.
Akihito, 72, also expressed concerns about fading knowledge of the past among
Japanese born after the war, and said he hoped experts would come up with
education guidelines to help the young respect other nations as well as their
own.
"It's extremely regrettable that many lives, including those of the Japanese,
were lost in the previous war," Akihito said at a news conference ahead of his
June 8-14 trip to Southeast Asia with Empress Michiko.
"We should never forget the history, and continue our endeavor through mutual
support with each nation so that we can make the world a place without
conflicts," he said.
Japanese unfair ruling on 1932 massacre protested
Three Japanese and Chinese social groups have issued a statement protesting
the rejection by the Japanese Supreme Court of a lawsuit filed by three Chinese
survivors of the 1932 massacre known as the Pingdingshan Tragedy.
A citizen group from Fushu in northeastern Liaoning Province, the Japanese
lawyers group representing Chinese victims and a Japanese citizens group
supporting the Chinese survivors jointly released the statement on Monday.
The Japanese Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the survivors on May 16. The
three plaintiffs, 83-year-old Yang Baoshan, 77-year-old Fang Surong, and the
late Mo Desheng, were all in their childhood when the massacre took place. They
sued the Japanese government for 20 million yen (182,000 U.S. dollars) and an
apology.
The lawsuit had dragged through Japanese courts since 1996 but it has now
exhausted all legal avenues of appeal in Japan. The case had been previously
rejected by Tokyo District Court and the Tokyo High Court. All the courts cited
the Japanese government's immunity from responsibility for damage inflicted
prior to the enactment of the State Compensation Law.
"We will always be with the Chinese plaintiffs and continue to try and get
the Japanese government to admit the facts and offer an apology to all the
victims of the massacre," said Izumisawa Akira, a representative of the Japanese
lawyers group.
In the Pingdingshan Massacre, the invading Japanese troops rounded up some
3,000 civilians in the village and executed them using machine guns. There were
only a handful of survivors.
Following the massacre, the Japanese soldiers burned the bodies and buried
the remains by triggering a landslide with dynamite. China excavated part of the
site in 1970.
