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China for

'responsible

attitude' to

war from Japan

BEIJING: Chinese President Jiang Zemin urged Japan to adopt a "responsible attitude" to its wartime aggression, saying this was vital to the healthy development of bilateral ties, the Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

Jiang expressed confidence that Japanese people and "far-sighted statesmen" would use the 50th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat to "adopt a responsible attitude towards history, correctly acknowledge and approach it, and maintain the political foundation for the Sino-Japanese relations.

"Only by doing so can good neighbourly relations between the two countries be developed continuously so as to really put an end to the past and usher in the future," the president was quoted as saying on Saturday.

The remarks came after China's foreign ministry expressed deep regret Thursday over a denial by Japan's new education minister of his country's aggression during World War II, warning such statements could hurt bilateral ties.

Official estimates put the number of Chinese who died during Japan's 1937-1945 occupation as high as 35 million.

Jiang, noting that China and Japan had maintained firendly neighbourly contacts for more than 2,000 years, said that the brief "unfortunate period" in contemporary history had brought disaster and untold sufferings to the hundreds of millions of Chinese people.

It also caused suffering among Japanese people, he said.-AFP