BEIJING — China’s military said Tuesday that more than 2,500 abandoned Japanese wartime chemical weapons collected from northern China, including Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, have been destroyed in a four-year disposal process.
Japan and China have been working together on the biggest chemical weapon cleanup effort in history, a decades-long, diplomatically sensitive project that is seen in China as a reminder of the wartime atrocities it suffered during Japan’s 1937 invasion and subsequent occupation.
Under the terms of a 1997 treaty, Tokyo is responsible for cleaning up hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons left behind by its occupation troops at the end of World War II. China says thousands of Chinese have been killed or hurt since the end of the war in 1945 by accidents related to the buried weapons.
