NANJING, China — Chinese President Xi Jinping skipped the country’s annual Nanjing Massacre memorial ceremony Saturday, leaving a senior Chinese Communist Party leader to deliver the main address. The scaled-back commemoration carried an unmistakable warning to Tokyo as Beijing condemns Japan’s Taiwan rhetoric and points to a recent run of military friction, Dec. 13, 2025.
Shi Taifeng, who heads the party’s powerful Organization Department, presided over the ceremony marking the 88th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre at the national memorial site, which lasted less than half an hour and ended with doves released over the crowd, according to a Reuters report from Nanjing. Shi referenced themes from Xi’s September military parade speech in Beijing marking 80 years since the end of World War II, Reuters reported, while Xi’s absence drew immediate notice because he last attended the ceremony in person in 2017.
Outside the memorial grounds, Chinese officials have leaned into sharper language. On Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called the Nanjing Massacre “a horrendous crime” and said, “There is no room for denial,” in remarks published by China’s consulate in Chicago. Guo tied the history message to current security disputes, including Taiwan, as Beijing accuses Japan of drifting toward a more confrontational posture.
Nanjing Massacre memorial, with Taiwan in the background
The immediate flashpoint is Taiwan. Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has warned that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response, drawing furious pushback from Beijing. Days later, Japan said Chinese aircraft “intermittently illuminated” Japanese Air Self-Defense Force F-15s with radar for about 30 minutes during carrier operations near Okinawa — a claim detailed in a Japan Ministry of Defense press release and described in an Associated Press report.
China has rejected Tokyo’s characterization of the radar episode. But Saturday’s Nanjing Massacre memorial showed how Beijing can keep the official ceremony tightly choreographed while letting other channels carry the harder edge. Reuters reported that China’s Eastern Theatre Command posted an image of a bloodied sword striking a skeleton in a Japanese army cap, alongside a caption saying “the sea of blood and deep hatred are still before our very eyes.”
The Nanjing Massacre remains politically combustible because it sits at the intersection of memory and strategy. China says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in Nanjing in 1937; a postwar Allied tribunal estimated 142,000 dead, while some conservatives in Japan dispute that a massacre occurred, Reuters reported.
Continuity: the story keeps resurfacing
Beijing’s handling of the Nanjing Massacre has swung between appeals for restraint and moments of confrontation. When China launched its first national day of remembrance in 2014, Xi said no one could deny the atrocity and urged people not to “bear hatred” against an entire nation, ABC reported at the time. A Time magazine analysis from 2014 described China expanding wartime remembrance into a broader public-relations push as tensions with Japan rose. And in 2015, Japan threatened to withdraw UNESCO funding after disputed Nanjing Massacre documents were accepted into a global archive program, The Guardian reported.
For now, Xi’s empty spot at the Nanjing Massacre memorial leaves Beijing’s message split in two: controlled solemnity at the podium, and a sterner warning in the background.
