Chinese scars endure 70 years after Unit 731 liberation

It is decades since Li Fengqin's father was cut apart by Japanese doctors at a covert base used for human experiments, but she still hopes Tokyo will confront one of World War Two's most barbaric Asian chapters.
"This debt of blood must be paid," Li said, tearfully recalling his fate at Unit 731.
The world last week remembered 70 years since Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, a site that has become a global byword for acts of inhumanity.
Eight months later the Red Army was sweeping through northern China where its forces found themselves at the gates of another camp which still conjures visions of unspeakable horror.

Unit 731 -- at first described as a lumber mill, then a water purification plant -- was built to conduct research into germ warfare, weapons capabilities and the limits of the human body, rather than for mass extermination.
But its remains echo many of the chilling hallmarks of a former Nazi death camp -- a disused railway track, ghostly buildings, and a biting winter chill.

One structure contains rows of cages that housed giant rats which Japanese doctors used to produce the bubonic plague unleashed on hundreds of thousands of Chinese.
Elsewhere, dozens of gruesome surgical instruments are laid out, including tiny weighing scales for internal organs and clamps to fix hysterical patients into position.

"Experiments were carried out without anaesthetic so that the results would not be influenced," said Gao Yubao, director of the camp museum, which Chinese authorities plan to expand.
Behind him a video continually retells the story of a young Chinese woman who had her arms frozen stiff with ice, before being placed into a vat of hot water.
A reconstruction of the scene shows a Japanese doctor striking at the flesh, stripping it off and reducing her forearms to bones as her screams echo around the hall.
Imperial Japan's bloody invasion of China remains a major source of tension between Asia's two biggest economies, and Beijing commonly calls on Tokyo to "confront history".

The sprawling Unit 731 complex is in the southern outskirts of Harbin, the biggest city of Manchukuo, the puppet state set up by Japan after it occupied northern China in 1931.
At least 3,000 people, mostly Chinese civilians along with some Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, were experimented on and died between 1939 and 1945, Chinese state media say.