Foreign minister chides Japan's 'lack of common sense' (2)

Denial of militarism

Meanwhile, China's marine surveillance ships continued patrolling the waters off the islands on Tuesday, the Japanese coast guard said.

Lu Yaodong, director of the department of Japanese diplomacy of the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that the Japanese government recently has demonstrated a tendency to expand denial of its wartime deeds.

"Starting with denying its aggression toward its Asian neighbors, Japan now seems to have planned to overthrow the whole of world order after World War II," Lu said.

In the joint communique signed by China and Japan in 1972, the year they normalized diplomatic relations, Japan clearly states that "it firmly maintains its stand under Article 8 of the Potsdam Proclamation", Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a Tuesday news conference in Beijing.

Today mass media and public opinion pay more attention to Japan's militarist past regarding its neighbors, including China, but "the Chinese premier's speech sent an alert to the international community on the rumbling impulses that attempt to whitewash the whole war", Lu said.

Zhou Yongsheng, a Japanese studies expert at China Foreign Affairs University, said the Japan's current Cabinet has shown a stronger desire to revise the country's pacifist constitution and justify its militarist past.