THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Beijing reiterates call for Tokyo to make amends for wartime transgressions after Japan-South Korea deal

BEIJING—South Korea and Japan’s move to resolve a decades-old dispute over Korean wartime sex slaves drew a frosty response from China, where officials and citizens alike have long criticized Tokyo’s stance on its military transgressions during World War II.

China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday repeated its call for Japan to face up to its wartime history, while state media dismissed the deal as geopolitical puppetry by U.S. officials seeking to contain Beijing.

“During the Second World War, Japanese militarism forcefully recruited ‘comfort women’ across China,” said spokesman Lu Kang, using a common euphemism for the wartime sex slaves. “They have committed a grave crime. We urge the Japanese side to take seriously the concerns of the relevant parties and deal properly with the issue.”

Seoul and Tokyo reached an agreement over the issue on Monday. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized for the use of Korean women in Japanese military brothels, some of whom were teenagers, and provided $8.3 million in government funds for a foundation to help the women. With this accord, both countries said they consider the issue “finally and irreversibly” resolved.

In China, many social-media users denounced Tokyo for what they saw as lack of contrition over similar historical wrongdoings on the mainland.

“You can compensate South Korean comfort women, but when it comes to Chinese comfort women, you renege on your debts,” Chinese writer Liu Xinda wrote on his verified Weibo microblog. “They are all comfort women; on what grounds do you draw distinctions between them?”

The official comments echo China’s long-standing rhetoric against Japan, which intensified in 2012 over a territorial dispute between the two over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. That led to anti-Japanese demonstrations in a number of Chinese cities, including in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. Japan has recently boosted military spending in part to bolster its readiness in the region.

Relations between the countries were further strained when Mr. Abe became prime minister in late 2012 and pushed for a more muscular regional stance. Mr. Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo—which honors Japan’s war dead—in late 2013, and subsequent visits by members of his cabinet, have also drawn angry responses from China.

But tensions have since eased slightly, as Chinese President Xi Jinping shifted focus on territorial disputes with other neighbors in the South China Sea and Mr. Abe has taken some conciliatory steps. The two met in April in Indonesia at a summit of Asian and African leaders.

Beijing and Tokyo have endured often-fractious ties since the end of World War II, during and before which Japan held large parts of the mainland in a brutal occupation. At the time, Japanese troops forced many Chinese women into sexual slavery, a practice that was replicated across other Japanese-occupied territories. China’s antagonism also stems from atrocities ranging from the 1937 Nanjing massacre to medical experiments conducted on Chinese prisoners by Japan’s notorious Unit 731.

China’s communist leaders have long relied on stoking nationalism to help shore up the party’s political legitimacy and further foreign-policy goals. Japan is the most regular target of such publicity campaigns, most recently in September, when Beijing held a grand military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Bilateral ties have shown signs of thawing over the past year, after a meeting between Messrs. Xi and Abe in late 2014 paved the way for further high-level interactions, said Akio Takahara, an expert on Chinese politics at Tokyo University.

Even so, Beijing has often dismissed Mr. Abe’s efforts to repair ties as insincere, citing his efforts to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution and strengthen its military.

Such skepticism surfaced again Tuesday, when Mr. Lu, the Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman, said, “We are looking forward to seeing whether the Japanese side will do what it has promised.”

Chinese state media also raised doubts about Tokyo’s sincerity and highlighted anger over the deal among some South Korean victims.

The official Xinhua News Agency questioned why Mr. Abe’s wife on Monday announced a recent visit to Yasukuni. “Taking into consideration the mixed nature of signals sent out by Tokyo in recent days, as well as Abe’s undeniable history of prevarication and obfuscation and habit for historical revisionism, people have good reason to remain doubtful,” it said in a Tuesday commentary.

In its midday news broadcast on Tuesday, official broadcaster China Central Television aired footage showing former Korean sex slaves protesting against the accord.

On Chinese social media, many users decried the accord as the fruit of cynical geopolitical maneuvering by Japan and the U.S. They say the deal helps Tokyo and Washington’s bid to use Seoul as a buffer against China’s rising clout in the Asia-Pacific.

“In the Japan-South Korea accord on comfort women, we can clearly see the shadows of the U.S. flitting in the background,” wrote a user on the Weibo microblogging service. U.S. officials have said they have encouraged closer ties between the two, and praised Monday’s deal as beneficial for regional peace and stability.

Scholars say Monday’s agreement suggests Seoul may be easing back from recent efforts to foster closer ties with Beijing.

“South Korea started to look to China because it wanted to rebuild its stagnant economy,” and gain leverage over North Korea through Beijing’s influence over Pyongyang, said Satoshi Amako, a China expert at Waseda University in Tokyo. Since then, “the Chinese economy started to slow down and it became unclear whether South Korea could benefit as much as it expected…[while] China’s relations with North Korean have been deteriorating.”

Global Times, a Chinese nationalistic tabloid run by the official Communist Party’s People’s Daily, dismissed the speculation that Monday’s accord would help Tokyo win diplomatic leverage against Beijing.

“Such analysis is not unreasonable, but exaggerates the strategic significance of the deal,” Global Times said in a Tuesday editorial. “South Korea is not a key factor in the Sino-Japanese relationship.”

“The comfort women deal doesn’t mean the South Korean society has endorsed the attitude of the Japanese government over history, and it in no way impairs the legitimacy of China’s demand for Japan to introspect on the history of aggression,” said the newspaper, which carried a similarly worded editorial in its Chinese-language edition.

— Felicia Sonmez in Beijing and Chieko Tsuneoka in Tokyo contributed to this article.

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com