China remembers 1937 incident that led to war with Japan

China held ceremonies across the country on Tuesday to mark the 89th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which led to the start of the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War, amid heightened bilateral tensions over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan.

Yin Li, secretary of the ruling Communist Party in Beijing, presided over a memorial event at the Museum of the War of the Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression near the bridge, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

About 500 people, including students, military personnel and family members of those who perished in the war, attended the ceremony in Beijing. Students recited poems and performed songs, Xinhua said.

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Similar memorial events were held in other Chinese cities, including Nanjing, where mass killings by Japanese troops occurred in 1937, according to state-run China Central Television.

On July 7, 1937, a skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops near the Marco Polo Bridge, also known as the Lugou Bridge, in southwestern Beijing escalated into the war, which lasted until Japan’s surrender to the Allied powers in 1945.

The anniversary came amid a diplomatic row between the two Asian neighbors, sparked by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks last November about a Taiwan contingency.

Several Chinese state-run media outlets on Tuesday warned against what they described as Japan’s “remilitarization,” taking issue with Takaichi’s defense buildup policies.

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The Japanese premier’s comments in November suggested that an attack by China on Taiwan, a self-ruled democratic island Beijing claims, could prompt a response by the Japan Self-Defense Forces in support of the United States.

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of the island’s main opposition party, criticized Japan’s past colonial rule at an event commemorating the incident, describing the 50-year period as “tragic.”

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The leader of the Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang, said not only China but also East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific were plunged into a “hell of war,” according to her party.

Cheng said her grandfather was sent to the Philippines to fight for Japan during World War II, adding that the grandfathers of many others were also dispatched to Southeast Asia to serve Japan’s military.

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She said her grandfather never forgot, until the final moments of his life, that Japan had failed to compensate him or provide the justice he believed he deserved, adding that people like him serve as a reminder that “history cannot simply be forgotten.”

“The painful history of blood and tears is not meant to preserve hatred, trigger another war or allow past tragedies to be repeated,” Cheng said. “If tragedies are to be prevented from recurring, people must bravely confront that period of history.”

After China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, which broke out in 1894, the Qing dynasty signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ceding Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan and beginning 50 years of Japanese colonial rule that lasted until 1945.

During World War II, many Taiwanese were conscripted into the Japanese military and sent to battlefields across Asia.

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Cheng, whose party advocates a more conciliatory approach toward the mainland, held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in April. /dl