China urges Japan to deal with boy’s fatal stabbing ‘calmly’
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A woman placing a bouquet of flowers outside Shenzhen Japanese School on Sept 18, following the fatal stabbing of a 10-year-old child the day before.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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BEIJING – China’s top diplomat Wang Yi told his Japanese counterpart that he hoped Tokyo would handle the fatal stabbing of a schoolboy in Shenzhen
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida demanded an explanation
The boy, reportedly 10 years old, was stabbed on his way to a Japanese school. Beijing’s Foreign Ministry said one of his parents was Japanese and the other Chinese.
Mr Wang met Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa during a visit to New York and told her that China would investigate and handle the case “in accordance with the law”.
According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Mr Wang said: “Japan should view this calmly and rationally and avoid politicising or escalating the issue.”
He added that Beijing “will as always safeguard the safety of all foreign citizens in China”.
It remains unclear if the attack was politically motivated, although it happened on Sept 18 – the anniversary of the 1931 “Mukden incident” or “Manchurian incident”, known in China as a day of national humiliation.
On that day, an explosion on a railway was used by Japanese soldiers as a pretext to occupy the city of Mukden, now called Shenyang, and invade the wider region.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry said Ms Kamikawa “strongly demanded” that China clarify relevant facts, including the motives, and strictly punish the perpetrator.
She demanded in particular that China act against “malicious and anti-Japanese posts on social media, including those related to Japanese schools, that have no basis in fact”.
“Minister Kamikawa then requested that the two countries as neighbours work earnestly to improve the situation by squarely facing issues that serve as obstacles to the bilateral exchange,” Japan’s ministry said.
Ms Kamikawa said before departing for New York for the UN General Assembly that Japan would spend 43 million yen (S$384,000) to ramp up security at Japanese schools in China.
Beijing expressed “regret and sadness” last week for what it called an isolated incident that “could happen in any country”.
But China’s Foreign Ministry on Sept 23 decried attempts by some in Japan to link the killing with “so-called ‘anti-Japanese’ sentiment on Chinese social media networks”.
They are “magnifying and hyping up so-called ‘security risks’”, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian told a regular news conference in Beijing.
“This kind of rhetoric is clearly inconsistent with the facts,” he said.
Relations between the countries have worsened as China grows more assertive in territorial disputes in the region and as Japan boosts security ties with the US and its allies.
But Beijing announced last week that it would “gradually resume” importing seafood from Japan after imposing a ban in 2023 over the release of water from the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant. AFP
