Despite Japan Tensions, China Holds Nanjing Massacre Memorial

China held a low-key memorial ceremony on Saturday for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with President Xi Jinping not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan .

Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last month that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Chinese-claimed Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan.

China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital.

A post-World War Two Allied tribunal put the death toll in the eastern city of Nanjing at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars have denied that a massacre took place at all.