Seventy-two years ago today, in 1931, Japan invaded northeast China, starting a 14-year expansionist war on the mainland and in other parts of Asia.
The Chinese government has been marking this painful anniversary fairly predictably. But this year's commemoration will make history: more than one million Chinese - 1,119,248 to be precise - from China and around the world have signed a 'joint statement' via 12,518 participating websites.
The statement was an unprecedented grassroots reaction to a number of recent incidents involving chemical weapons abandoned by the Japanese army in China at the end of the second world war.
The most serious case was in the northeast city of Qiqihar, where 43 people were poisoned last month. Among the victims was 33-year-old farm worker Li Guizhen. He suffered burns to 95 per cent of his body while trying to recycle scrap metal from five buried containers, all filled with mustard-gas agents. He died two weeks after being exposed.
The signed statement calls for support for these and other victims of Japan's 'forgotten' chemical weapons. It demands that Japan apologise for its chemical war crimes, clean up the discarded chemical weaponry, take concrete measures to ensure public safety and compensate victims.
Sponsored by China's civilian activist groups, the joint statement and the 4,000 pages of signatures (with names and addresses to avoid fraud) will be sent to the Japanese embassy in Beijing today.
During the second world war, the Japanese army conducted large-scale chemical and germ warfare in China. On more than 2,000 occasions, from 1937 to 1945, Japanese chemical weapons caused more than 100,000 Chinese casualties. Japan's chemical warfare facilities were so widespread and extensive that between 700,000 (the Japanese estimate) and two million (the Chinese estimate) chemical weapons were left behind in China at the end of the war in 1945. This makes China the largest site of abandoned chemical weapons on earth.
