China marks victory over Japan

China commemorated its victory over Japan in the Sino-Japanese war at the site of one of its best-known battles on Thursday, giving its version of disputed events that decades later have brought relations to a new low.
To the strains of a 100-piece military band, hundreds of doves were set free, 60 red flares were shot into the hazy sky and leaders held a moment of silence for Chinese soldiers who died before unveiling an exhibition called "Great Victory".
Unlike events marking the end of World War Two elsewhere, which have brought old foes together, no Japanese dignitaries were invited to the commemoration at a war museum near the Marco Polo Bridge just outside Beijing. The war ended 60 years ago.
Relations between China and Japan are at their lowest in decades over a series of disagreements hinging on what Beijing sees as Tokyo's intransigence over its militaristic past.
Tensions spiralled in April when thousands of Chinese protested against Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and the revision of a Japanese school history textbook which critics say whitewashes wartime atrocities.
Vice Premier Wu Yi cancelled a meeting in May with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are honoured along with Japan's other war dead.
"History is a mirror of present-day realities, and also a textbook teeming with philosophical wisdom," Liu Yunshan, a member of the Communist Party's leading Politburo, said in a speech before about 1,000 soldiers, students and other people at the exhibition.
The new exhibit "lays bare the war atrocities committed by the Japanese militarists, eulogises the extraordinary heroism of the Chinese people, and underscores the patriotism-centred national spirit" of China, he said.
The Sino-Japanese war has been a major source of legitimacy for the Communist Party, and the government has been accused of whipping up anti-Japan sentiment. But Wang Xinhua, curator of the Memorial Hall of the Chinese People's War Against Japan, said the exhibition was intended to be merely educational.
"We are putting on this exhibition to use historical facts to teach the people, not to fan some kind of nationalist feelings," he told reporters.
"I think telling facts of history to the people of China and Japan will be of benefit to better building healthy Sino-Japanese relations."
Thursday marked the 68th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, a skirmish that marked a turning point in the Chinese resistance and is credited by many as the spark that started eight years of war.
On the night of July 7, 1937, Japanese troops were conducting exercises on one side of the bridge while Chinese Nationalist troops were on the other. The Japanese side demanded to search the Chinese side for a missing soldier, but the Nationalists refused and the argument devolved into a battle.