BEIJING: A Chinese court has ordered two Japanese historians to pay damages of 1.6m yuan (£110,000) to a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing massacre whom they accused of fabricating her account.

Although the ruling is largely symbolic because it has no force in Japan, the defamation lawsuit opens up a new front in a row that has led to trials, demonstrations and a deterioration in relations between the countries.

The Nanjing court judged that Xia Shuqin had suffered psychological trauma and damage to her reputation from two books published in Tokyo that denied large-scale slaughter in Nanjing, despite Chinese claims that 300,000 civilians were killed by the Japanese imperial army.

The authors, Shudo Higashinakano and Toshio Matsumura, said testimonies by Ms Xia — who was eight years old in 1937 — and another survivor, Li Xiuying, were faked. As well as validating Ms Xia’s account and awarding compensation, the court ordered the publisher, Tendensha, to destroy the books and apologise in Chinese and Japanese newspapers.

The defendants, who were not in court, rejected the result and their publisher condemned it as an attempt to meddle with Japan’s freedom of speech. The Tokyo war crimes tribunal estimated that 142,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed in and near Nanjing.

Japanese nationalists have argued that the allied-controlled tribunal inflated the figure, while Chinese scholars — notably Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking — have said the toll was twice as high.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service