At 9:35 a.m. Thursday, Shanghai's state-owned Xinmin Evening News newspaper tweeted a reminder to its 1.8 million followers on the Sina Weibo microblogging service: "The Japanese surrendered 68 years ago today!"
The tweet honored the roughly 35 million Chinese who died during the war and included five black-and-white images from the time, including a photo of an Imperial Japanese Army soldier standing over a trench filled with the bodies of Chinese civilians, and another of Japanese soldiers loading Chinese into trucks.
Images such as these would be emotionally charged in any country that suffered a foreign invasion. But in China, where there's a long-standing national consensus that Japan has never truly apologized for the war, they have ongoing resonance.
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