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China Wants WWII Germ Warfare Test Base to be on World Heritage List
China is preparing to have the world's largest germ warfare experimental base, which was built by Japanese troops in China during World War II, put on the World Heritage list.
China started cleaning the site of Unit 731 of Japan's Kwantung Army in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang this month. Over 100 households and some 10 factories are scheduled to move away from the site.
The project which will probably cost nearly 100 million yuan (US$12 million) has got approval from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. Some Japanese non-governmental organizations and civilians have made donations in support of the project as well.
Chinese researchers hope to find out more evidence from the scraps of the slaughterhouse which will be preserved permanently as a special reminder of the World War II.
Unit 731 was part of Japan's Kwantung Army, whose headquarters were in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang, in 1932. It is notorious for manufacturing materials for germ warfare that were tested on more than 10,000 live people.
More than 300 pieces of relics have been found at this site, including anatomic appliances, incubators and shrapnel with germs. What also remains on the site are vestiges of incinerators, a vivisection center and typhoid and cholera laboratories. More solid proof of Unit 731's crimes are likely to be found.
The six-square-kilometer site is now guarded and isolated by enclosures with a sign that says "danger."
The results of experiment show no residue of germs in the area, according to experts from the Chinese People's Liberation Army Medical Research Institute and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine who have participated in the checkup.
Zhang Bai, deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, compared the germ experiment in northeast China with the slaughters at the Auschwitz concentration camp and in east China's Nanjing City.
"The germ experiments are one of the most appalling Nazi war crimes," he said. "The site of Unit 731 should be forever preserved."
The Kwantung Army headquarters burned and buried its records of Unit 731 to get rid of evidence just before Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. A large amount of the germ experiment data was transferred to the United States.
Based on confessions from Japanese war criminals, more than 3, 000 people died from the experiments during 1940-45. But some records suggest a much larger figure, according to experts.
Judging from the records, Unit 731 experimented on more than 10, 000 prisoners of war and civilians from China, the Korean Peninsula, and the former Soviet Union, and at least 936 died in the first nine months of 1941. Over 200,000 people died from the germ arms in the battle field.
Jin Chengmin, vice-curator of the archives on Unit 731, said, " The site of a living hell will be renovated into a museum appealing for peace throughout the world in four to five years."
So far 23 Chinese cultural and natural sites have been approved by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for the list. None of them has been for wars.
Hiroshima, one of the two Japanese cities which suffered from an atomic bomb in 1945, has succeeded in applying for being inscribed on the World Heritage list sponsored by UNESCO.
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