Nanjing, China, May 16 (CTK) – Czech President Milos Zeman and his wife Ivana on Tuesday laid a wreath to the memorial to the victims of the massacre in which the Japanese army killed about 300,000 people in Nanjing, then China’s capital city, in 1937.
Zeman is one of the first world’s statesmen who visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.
“I came to bow in deep respect to the victims of the Nanjing massacre, like I arrived to a parade in Beijing two years ago,” Zeman told Li Qiang, chief of the China’s Communist Party in the Jiangsu Province.
In 2015, Zeman took part in the Chinese military parade that marked 70 years from the end of World War Two, being the only Western statesman present.
Zeman said World War Two actually started in Nanjing in 1937, not two years later, if it is considered a war against the German or Japanese fascism.
Li Qiang told Zeman he believed that the economic relations between the Czech Republic and the Jiangsu Province would be developing.
Jiangsu is a coastal province in eastern China, north of Shanghai, and it has about 80 million inhabitants, eight times more than the Czech Republic.
In 1937, Japanese soldiers massively killed Chinese prisoners of war, raped local women and burnt down a large part of the city. The exact number of victims is not known. China estimated it at 300,000, while an international military tribunal put it at more than 200,000 in 1946. Some conservative Japanese politicians say the figure was lower or they completely deny the mass murder and mass rape.
In 2016, Japan refused to send a financial contribution to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) because the documents related to the Nanjing massacre were recently included in UNESCO’s Memory of World register.
Czech Presidential Office foreign affairs chief Rudolf Jindrak told CTK that he does not expect the Czech-Japanese relations to worsen because of the visit to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall since Zeman only paid his respects to the victims.
Jindrak said Chinese President Xi Jinping thanked Zeman for his decision to visit the memorial.
During Zeman’s stay in Nanjing, three Chinese-Czech memorandums were signed, concerning cooperation between the Czech Health Ministry and the Jiangsu healthcare department, medical treatment of Chinese children in the Czech Republic, and cooperation between the Chinese Sanpower Group and the Czech biotechnology firm Sotio, owned by the PPF Group of Petr Kellner.
Zeman’s one-week official visit to China will end on May 18. He has met his counterpart Xi and attended a conference promoting the new Silk Road project, being the only participating head of an EU member state. Many Western representatives showed interest in the new Silk Road, but said the project is not transparent.
