China demanded on Thursday that Japan destroy about 2 million chemical weapons abandoned by the retreating Japanese Imperial Army at the end of World War Two, Reuters reported. China has complained that Japan has been slow in clearing up the weapons buried or discarded by the Japanese after the war ended in 1945. China says some 2,000 Chinese have been harmed by such weapons. "The Chinese side strongly demands the Japanese side bear its due responsibility and obligation," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei as saying. He urged Japan "to thoroughly and completely destroy chemical weapons abandoned in China" as soon as possible. Relations between Japan and China have frayed over a host of issues, at the core of which are disputes that stem from Japan's invasion and occupation of parts of China from 1931 to 1945. Japan is required to dispose of chemical weapons left in China by 2007 under an international treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention. Japanese studies have placed the number of such shells at about 700,000. Tokyo promised in 1999 to provide funding, technology, manpower, facilities and other assets needed to scrap the weapons. In June this year, three Chinese were taken to hospital after inhaling poison gas that leaked from abandoned shells while removing sand on a riverbank in Guangzhou, capital of the southern province of Guangdong. Two schoolboys were injured in northeastern China in July 2004 when they uncovered and played with World War Two chemical weapons, Chinese state media said. In August 2003, a toxic leak killed one man and injured 43 after five canisters of mustard gas were unearthed at a construction site in northeastern province of Heilongjiang. Japan has agreed to pay 300 million yen ($2.75 million) in compensation. Ties between the two Asian giants have been strained particularly over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni shrine, which China sees as a symbol of Japan's past militarism and where convicted war criminals are honoured along with Japan's war dead.
