PEKING -- On the eve of the 37th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, China launched blistering media attacks Saturday against the Japanese for textbook changes that downplay wartime atrocities.
The new attacks came only one day after discussions failed to resolve the dispute.
Chinese television Saturday broadcast a film on Japan's aggression during its 1937-45 occupation of China.
The television commentary condemned 'distortion of historical truth in textbooks,' a phrase repeated later in a radio commentary.
'We don't want to settle old accounts, but they are not to be forgotten, still less to be distorted,'said a Sunday editorial in People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.
The editorial, released Saturday, accused unidentified Japanese of trying to lead Japan 'to the old path of militarism' and said the alleged whitewashing of the war in new textbooks is 'an intolerable step.'
Pictures taken during the Japanese occupation of China also reappeared in the press Saturday and the official Xinhua news agency told how Japanese troops allegedly worked to death 30,000 people at an iron factory in Peking.
'Many sick and injured workers were thrown into the pits and the Japanese choked them to death with lime,' worker Fan Zuowu was quoted as saying.
The media attacks came a day after two Japanese officials left Peking without resolving the controversy that has also angered both South Korea and North Korea and other Asian nations occupied by Japan's former Imperial Army.
Japanese sources said little progress was made in the talks, during which the Chinese media attacks had stopped.
In Tokyo, major Japanese newspapers Saturday attacked the government of Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki for its handling of the textbook affair.
'Suzuki will be guilty of contemptible procrastination if he decides to state his position only after anti-Japanese demonstrations erupt abroad,' the Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial titled 'Suzuki's silence.'
Mainichi Shimbun, another daily with nation-wide circulation, criticized the government for authorizing what the newspaper called 'unjustifiable' revisions of school history texts.
China and South Korea have been irked by new Japanese texts that label the Japanese 'aggression' an 'advance' during the Japan-China War and dismiss the pro-independence demonstrations in Korea in 1919 as riots.
The new textbooks also drop detailed accounts of the Japanese massacre of some 200,000 Chinese at Nanking in 1937.
