Nanjing massacre: China's Xi Jinping leads first state commemoration

[Ray]

Nanjing massacre: China's Xi Jinping leads first state commemoration

Chinese President Xi Jinping has presided over his country's first state commemoration of the Nanjing massacre.

China says 300,000 civilians were massacred when the city was occupied by Japan's troops in 1937, although some Japanese nationalists dispute this.

President Xi told survivors that to deny a crime was to repeat it but insisted the ceremony was to promote peace, not prolong hatred.

Relations between the two countries have been strained in recent years.

They have clashed over island territory in the East China Sea as well as over Japan's insistence on honouring its war dead, including convicted war criminals, at the Yasukuni shrine.

The ceremony, which came on the 77th anniversary of the massacre, is part of three new public holidays intended to mark the conflict between the two countries.

A crowd of about 10,000 people attended the event in Nanjing, taking part in a minute's silence to honour those killed. They included survivors of the massacre, as well as soldiers and students.

BBC News - Nanjing massacre: China's Xi Jinping leads first state commemoration

The so called 'Nanking Massacre' has been contested by the Japan since they claim that statistically the numbers bandied are impossible to have been massacred in that timeframe.

But then arousing the state of fear is believed to be an unpleasant emotional state that involves physiological arousal that motivates cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses directed towards alleviating the threat or reducing fear, diverting attention from the domestic failing and coalescing diverse elements to a common 'enemy' or a threat.

China requires the ghosts of the past to create a fear psychosis so that it diverts the people from the negativity they face in contemporary times to include an unresponsive governance.