China yesterday broke with its policy of banning demonstrations by allowing protests against the highly controversial visit earlier this week by the Japanese Prime Minister to a shrine for war dead in Tokyo.
Police stood back and watched small demonstrations outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing, Tokyo's consulate in Shanghai, and at a memorial in Nanjing, where Japanese troops massacred Chinese civilians in 1937.
The protests were the first allowed in China since NATO aircraft bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade two years ago during the Kosovo campaign.
They are seen as reflecting the depth of Beijing's anger over Mr Koizumi's visit.
Japanese forces invaded and occupied much of China and other parts of Asia before and during the second World War and China remains an outspoken critic of Japanese aggression and the atrocities which were committed during that period.
Banners carried such slogans as "Don't forget the past". China argues that acts such as Mr Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni shrine to the war dead demonstrates Japan's refusal to acknowledge its militarist and expansionist past. In Beijing, at least two groups of students demonstrated separately outside the Japanese embassy yesterday.
Some 30 students from Qinghua University displayed a banner reading "Down with Japanese imperialism" and sang patriotic Chinese songs to onlookers before leaving.
Three young Chinese men burned crudely made Japanese flags and shouted obscenities. Police stood by as the men set fire to two paper flags and a larger flag made of cloth in front of the embassy's main gate.
In Shanghai, protesters at the Japanese consulate pinned up banners denouncing Mr Koizumi's visit.
"We vehemently oppose the visit to the shrine," read one banner, which was later removed by police.