Piles of archival material released on Wednesday show China's magnanimity when dealing with Japanese war criminals involved in the invasion of China during World War II.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry declassified its diplomatic files from 1956 to 1960 last week. The historical documents record China's diplomacy during the five-year period.

Japan is one of the countries featured in the files. As early as 1956 China was pondering how to normalize relations with the country that was brought to its knees 10 years before.

Bearing that purpose in mind, China gave up suing 1,063 Japanese war criminals in 1956 after finishing investigations into their crimes.

A declassified memorandum China sent to the former Soviet Union on April 25, 1956 displays the Chinese Government's decision to take a lenient approach towards Japanese war criminals to help promote normalization of China-Japan relations.

The Chinese National People's Congress passed a decision on settling the Japanese war criminals on April 25, 1956, in which the Chinese Government sentenced those guilty of serious crimes to less than 20 years' imprisonment.

China decided to abandon the prosecution of some 1,000 criminals who showed minor guilt or penitence, and set them free.

These released criminals were later repatriated by the Chinese Red Cross Society, the memorandum says.

The war of aggression against China by the Japanese militarists inflicted immense disaster on the Chinese people.

According to incomplete statistics, the war resulted in 35 million Chinese casualties and more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and troops were massacred in Nanjing, a city in eastern China, in 1937.

Saza Shinnosuke, a lieutenant general during the war and one of the 1,063 Japanese detainees in China, described his hope to apologize to the Chinese people and asked his government to convey his feelings to the next generation so as not to follow his old path.

The magnanimity China showed to the Japanese war criminals is an impressive testament to the Chinese Government's forward-looking mindset in terms of its relations with Japan.

The lenience, however, should not necessarily mean that Japan is innocent of conducting an aggressive war against China.

China's magnanimous gesture in 1956 failed to move the Japanese leader now in power. His annual homage to the Yasukuni Shrine where Class-A war criminals are worshipped has frozen the political dimension of the two countries' bilateral relations.

Shinnosuke's call has fallen on deaf ears.

The newly declassified files open a window enabling us to see what the Chinese Government did to normalize relations with this neighbor.

Sincere remorse has won many of the 1,063 Japanese detainees in China a pardon from the Chinese, the victims included.
 
(China Daily May 15, 2006)