China yesterday urged Japan to cancel a visa for a former Taiwan leader to avoid damaging its ties with China, warning that Lee Teng-hui would promote "Taiwan independence."
"The purpose of visiting Japan is to seek backing for Taiwan independence and create external conditions for speeding up his independence activities," said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao.
"We hope the Japanese side would immediately repeal its decision giving consent to Lee Teng-hui's visit to Japan," Liu said at a regular news briefing in Beijing. "Otherwise, it will have a negative impact on relations between China and Japan."
China also called on Japan to face up to its military's wartime use of sex slaves after a Tokyo court rejected a lawsuit by four elderly Chinese women seeking damages from the Japanese government for being raped repeatedly by Japanese soldiers during the World War II.
"We think that the forced conscription of 'comfort women' is a very severe and grave crime," the spokesman said. "We hope the Japanese side could approach properly these historical remnants."
Liu said China had "taken note" of the latest ruling but didn't say what steps the Chinese government wants Japan to take.
Japan's military shipped thousands of women from China, South Korea and other Asian countries to provide sex for Japanese troops and to use in brothels established in occupied territories.
Historians say some 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery.
Japan acknowledged in the 1990s that its military set up and ran brothels for its troops, but Japan has rejected most compensation claims, saying they were settled by postwar treaties.
While refusing to grant compensation, the Tokyo High Court on Wednesday recognized that the four plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit were taken to Japanese military bases and repeatedly raped between 1942 and 1944 in Shanxi Province in north China.
The four women sought 23 million yen (US$219,000). In handing down the rejection, Presiding Judge Makoto Nemoto admitted that the Japanese military set up wartime brothels in China and the four plaintiffs were forced by the military into the brothels.