China on Friday commemorated the 80th anniversary of the beginning of nationwide war against Japanese aggression.

A ceremony was held at the Museum of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression near Lugou Bridge, also known as Marco Polo Bridge, where Japan’s full-scale invasion of China began on July 7, 1937.

Liu Yunshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said at the ceremony that the war prompted national awakening and unity, changed the destiny of the Chinese nation, and safeguarded justice and world peace.

Any attempt to deny or whitewash the history of invasion and any deed to undermine trust between nations run counter to the historical trend, Liu said.

About 1,000 people, including veterans and relatives of the fallen, attended the ceremony, which was presided over by Liu Qibao, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.

On July 7, 1937, Japanese soldiers attacked Chinese forces at the Lugou Bridge in suburban Beijing, which is recognized as the start of nationwide war against Japanese invasion. Actually, the Chinese people’s struggle against Japanese aggression started in September 1931 when Japanese troops began their invasion of northeast China.

A total of 44 people have been died or missing after floods hit Ningxiang County in central China’s Hunan Province, local flood prevention headquarters said Friday.

Heavy downpours pounded the county since June 22, leading to the area’s worst natural disaster in 60 years. A total of 44 people died or remain unaccounted for, the headquarters said.

About 815,000 people, or 56 percent of the county’s population, suffered property losses in the floods, it said.

In Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, to the south, flood left 20 people dead and 14 missing. Around 20,000 houses collapsed or were damaged.

Nineteen people died and 30 were injured, when a coach overturned on an expressway Thursday afternoon in south China’s Guangdong Province.

The accident occurred around 1 p.m. on an expressway section in Huizhou, according to city authorities. There were 49 people on the 55-seater bus when the accident happened.

Ma Xiqin, a passenger on the bus, sustained multiple injuries from shattered glass. She was travelling home with her mother-in-law on the double-decker after an operation.

“I had just returned to my seat, when suddenly the bus veered onto the roadside,” recalled Ma, 35. “I tried to pull myself and my mother-in-law out, and I heard many people crying for help.”

It was raining heavily, Ma said, and she and her mother-in-law crawled under the expressway to wait for rescuers.

Of the injured, 24 are being treated in a local hospital in Longmen.

“Six of them were seriously injured,” said hospital director Chen Guoqiang.

Traffic on the expressway section has resumed, and an investigation is underway.

Atrocities committed by Japanese Army Unit 731, a germ warfare unit once stationed in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, have been further exposed in newly found historical documents.

The 24 documents collected in Japan were written by members of Unit 731, according to Yang Yanjun, associate researcher at the Unit 731 Research Center of Harbin Academy of Social Sciences.

Unit 731 was established in Harbin in 1935, during the Japanese army’s occupation of northeast China.

Soldiers in the unit took photographs and wrote papers on the region’s wetlands, geology, mountains, and water resources to prepare for germ warfare and provide references for Japanese immigrants.

Other documents include materials collected by the unit on epidemic prevention, geology, transport and laws of the Soviet Union. The documents were produced between March 1937 and November 1939, Yang said.

According to Jin Chengmin, curator of the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731, human experiments, production, experiments and use of germ weapons were the core of Unit 731 activity.

In 1941, a Chinese man named Li Pengge was detained after refusing to help Japanese Intelligence detect Soviet signals, Jin said. Li was sent to Unit 731 and met a gruesome death on an operating table aged 25.

Jin said more than 3,000 people died at Unit 731. The unit conducted experiments on at least 93 Soviet people during World War II. Among them were prisoners of war and civilians, including women and children.

The Japanese government continues to deny the crimes despite the evidence. No one involved with Unit 731 has ever been tried for war crimes.

Ordinary Japanese people feel sorry to war victims after knowing the truth. On this year’s Tomb Sweeping Day, a Japanese delegation including three war orphans visited the exhibition in Harbin.

After the war, many fleeing Japanese left their children behind, who were then cared for by Chinese families. These children, many now at least in their seventies, are called war orphans.

According to the museum, Unit 731 produced around 300 kilograms of plague bacillus, 600 kg of anthrax bacteria, 800 to 900 kg of typhoid bacteria, and thousands of kilograms of other deadly pathogens each month.

Between 1937 and 1942, the unit manufactured more than 2,000 germ bombs, loaded with fleas infected with plague bacillus.

“If war had not ended in 1945 and Japan had begun large-scale germ warfare, that could lead to the disappearance of humans, given the production capacity of Unit 731,” said Yang.

Already home to the world’s first cloned dog using somatic cell transfer technique, China is now the world’s first country to clone a dog using gene editing, after Sinogene, a Beijing-based biotech company, announced the achievement on July 5, Science and Technology reported.

China is the second country to master somatic cell cloning technology, followed by South Korea, according to Lai Liangxue, a researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Dog cloning has always been regarded in the scientific community as the most difficult, despite multiple successes in the cloning other mammals, including sheep, mice, cows, and pigs. Poor oocyte quality and the asynchronous reproduction cycle of the surrogate mother and the cloned embryo limit the application of the technology.

However, Lai’s team of scientists at Sinogene created a disease model using the latest gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 to achieve mass production. It is the first of its kind in the world.

“It is advantageous to combine cloning technology with gene editing, and China has taken the lead,” said a researcher from the Institute of Zoology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The company said it will promote commercial dog cloning services worldwide by establishing a gene-editing development and research base and a bank for somatic cells and genes.