BEIJING refused to apologise yesterday for violent protests in China over Japan’s wartime past and its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council seat.

“The Chinese Government has never done anything for which it has to apologise to the Japanese people,” Li Zhaoxing, the Foreign Minister, told his visiting Japanese counterpart as China allowed new demonstrations in at least six cities.

Mr Li said that Japan, instead, was to blame for “a series of things that have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people over issues such as relations with rival Taiwan and the subject of history”.

Nobutaka Machimura, the Japanese Foreign Minister, appealed to Mr Li to protect Tokyo’s diplomats and citizens as his Government denounced violence on Saturday in Shanghai, where police allowed 20,000 rioters to break windows and damage restaurants and cars.

“I wish the Chinese Government would sincerely handle this matter under international regulations,” Mr Machimura said, urging China to respect treaties that oblige Beijing to protect diplomatic missions.

In Shanghai, China’s biggest city, police stood by as around 20,000 rioters smashed windows at the Japanese consulate, wrecked Japanese noodle restaurants and overturned nearby Nissan cars. The latest protests recalled the previous weekend’s demonstrations in Beijing when windows at the embassy were smashed. Mr Machimura has demanded an apology and compensation.

“It’s possible that JapanChina relations as a whole, including on the economic front, could decline to a serious state,” Mr Machimura said.

While the riots have damaged Sino-Japanese relations, they have also raised a number of questions about domestic security in Beijing, which will host the Olympic Games in 2008, and in China as a whole.

These protests are more remarkable because popular dissent is not tolerated in China. Any displays of public disobedience are dealt with swiftly, especially since the pro-democracy protests in the spring of 1989, which went on for weeks before they ended in a bloody crackdown.

In Beijing, hundreds of police blanketed Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital to block a planned demonstration. There have been strong rumours that protests took place with the tacit approval of the Government.

But the scale of the protests seems to have taken the Government by surprise. Last week, it called for calm, apparently worried that the riots might encourage others to take to the streets to demonstrate against corruption or to demand political reforms. A front-page editorial in the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily yesterday called for the people to “maintain social stability”.

The protests have spread across China. Around 1,000 protesters tried to reach the Japanese consulate in the northeastern city of Shenyang yesterday, before being turned away by police.

One of the key issues has been the publication of a new Japanese history textbook which the Chinese and other Asian victims of the Japanese army during the Second World War say plays down the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese.

Protesters held banners saying “Face Up to History”, “The anti-Japan war is not over yet” and “Never forget the Nanjing massacre”, referring to the 1937 incident when Beijing says as many as 300,000 Chinese men, women and children were killed by Japanese troops in the former Chinese capital.

China is keen to boost its standing as an emerging world power and regards Tokyo as a rival for regional dominance.

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