China, Japan engaged in a war of words

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AP, Washington :
China and Japan are engaged in a war of words that is lighting up editorial pages around the world as Beijing takes aim at a recent visit by Japan’s leader to a controversial war shrine and Tokyo answers back.
Japan’s ambassador to the US fired the latest salvo Friday, accusing China of a global propaganda campaign that portrays Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as glorifying Japan’s militaristic past. “It is not Japan that most of Asia and the international community worry about; it is China,” Ambassador Kenichiro Sasae wrote in The Washington Post.
The dueling opinion pieces, appearing in a growing number of newspapers around the world, come as both nations have been criticized for recent actions: China’s declaration of an air defense zone over a disputed area of the East China Sea and the Japanese prime minister’s visit to Yasukuni, where convicted World War II war criminals are among the many enshrined.
Chinese diplomats have been especially blunt. Ambassadors have accused Abe of “a gross trampling upon world peace and human conscience” on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, having “put the international community on high alert” in Australia and doing something akin to “laying a wreath at Hitler’s bunker” in Madagascar.

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