中国银行

一 |     国家疾控局微信公众号消息，国家疾控局发布《关于做好2024年“五一”假期及春夏季新冠病毒感染等重点传染病疫情防控工作的通知》。    

    Photo: screenshot of the CNA documentary Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments
A documentary revisiting the Imperial Japanese Army's lethal human experiments and biological warfare program has attracted more than 1 million views online, bringing renewed global attention to one of World War II's darkest chapters and a history still little known outside Asia.
Produced by Singapore-based Channel NewsAsia (CNA), Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments features historians and descendants of survivors from countries including the UK, the US, Japan and Singapore. Through their accounts, the documentary details the germ warfare, human experimentation and other crimes against humanity committed by Unit 731 - officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army - during Japan's war of aggression.
Several US, Singaporean and Japanese scholars featured in the documentary recently told the Global Times that the evidence of Unit 731's crimes against humanity is irrefutable. The atrocities represent a shared trauma not only for Asian countries subjected to Japanese fascist aggression, but also for all humanity. "More than 80 years after the war, reviving the collective memory of affected countries is essential to safeguarding peace," they said.
Victims of germ warfare
For much of his life, Katsutoshi Takegami knew only that his father had once worked in China. It was not until years after his father's death that a discovery in the family storehouse prompted the 78-year-old resident of Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, to investigate what that work had involved.
Several thick photo albums had been packed into boxes marked "Nara Army Hospital." Across the black-and-white photographs were references to the "Epidemic Prevention Section" and the "Central China Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department."
"My father worked at a local public health center after World War II. He had mentioned that he had worked in China, but never revealed any details," Takegami told the Global Times. "When I saw those photographs, I desperately wanted to know what my father had done in China."
Determined to find an answer, Takegami closed the café he had spent years building, began examining historical records and consulted researchers. He even traveled to China in search of clues.
His investigation eventually revealed that his father had been a member of Unit 1644, also known as Unit Ei 1644, a germ-warfare formation based in Nanjing. The discovery came as a profound shock.
"When people talk about the Imperial Japanese Army's germ warfare, Unit 731 is usually the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, the Japanese military operated many such units," Takegami said.
"The general public knows almost nothing about them, and very few scholars study them. Historical evidence shows that the areas victimized by germ warfare extended far beyond Harbin, where Unit 731 was headquartered. China was by no means the only victimized country," he added.
For Singaporean independent scholar Lim Shao Bin, the realization that this biological warfare network had reached Southeast Asia came on February 14, 2016.
That day, Nobuyoshi Takashima, professor emeritus at the University of the Ryukyus, and his wife took Lim to the former Tampoi Mental Hospital on the outskirts of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Pointing to a row of buildings, Takashima told him: "This was a wartime production base for Unit 731's plague bombs."
"That cut deeply into me," Lim told the Global Times. "I had studied in Japan since the 1980s and believed I knew a great deal about the crimes committed by the Japanese invaders in China. But I never imagined that Singapore and Malaysia - right on our doorstep - had also suffered at the hands of Unit 731."
From that day forward, Lim began systematically tracing the activities of Japanese germ-warfare units in Southeast Asia.
He explained that the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory of the Imperial Japanese Army Medical School established the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army in Pingfang, Harbin, which became known as Unit 731.
    Photo: screenshot of the CNA documentary Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments
Using Unit 731 as the center of its operations, the Japanese military established the North China Expeditionary Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department in Beijing, known as Unit 1855; Unit Ei 1644 in Nanjing; and Unit Nami 8604 in Guangzhou.
''Yet this network still contained a major missing piece - Southeast Asia,'' Lim said.
The Japanese military established the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of Southern Expeditionary Army in Singapore under the code name Oka Unit 9420. Together, these interconnected germ-warfare formations constituted what Lim described as the "Unit 731 system."
A map compiled by Lim marks five branches of Oka Unit 9420 across Southeast Asia: the Malaya, Java, Manila, Indochina and Thailand branches. These facilities produced plague bacilli and fleas on a large scale, supplying the Japanese military with biological warfare materials and forming a regional germ-warfare network.
Historical documents indicate that Oka Unit 9420 was the largest Japanese germ-warfare unit operating outside the China theater.
In May 2025, Lim and Wang Xuan, president of the Zhejiang Provincial Historical Society's research association on the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), published a book on the Japanese Army's Oka Unit 9420 after five years of extensive research and writing.
The book offered the first comprehensive account of this nearly forgotten unit and was also the first historical monograph devoted to the Southern Expeditionary Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department.
Work far from over
The CNA documentary traces the origins of Japan's biological warfare ambitions to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, humanity's first major post-World War I attempt to prohibit the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Instead of treating the prohibition as a moral boundary, Shiro Ishii, the notorious commander of Unit 731, recognized the enormous military value of such weapons and regarded them as "a decisive means of winning future wars," according to the documentary.
Unit 731 presented itself publicly as an epidemic-prevention and public health organization. Its real purpose, however, was to conduct secret human experiments in support of biological warfare.
The experiments included infecting victims with plague-bearing fleas, injecting them with dysentery pathogens and subjecting them to frostbite tests in temperatures dozens of degrees below zero.
Japanese soldiers referred to prisoners of war and civilian victims as maruta, meaning "logs," stripping them of their humanity before using them as experimental subjects. Everyone sent into the laboratories eventually died.
As Lim's research shows, the system supporting these experiments extended far beyond Unit 731's headquarters in Harbin.
In February 2018, Lim obtained exclusive access to a reel of wartime film footage shot after 1942 by Tomosada Masuda, a close associate and former schoolmate of Ishii who later became a core member of Unit 731. The footage documented the activities of Oka Unit 9420 in Southeast Asia.
"Harbin's severe winters made it impossible to breed plague-infected fleas on a large scale throughout the year, so Unit 731 urgently needed a warm and humid cultivation base," Lim said. "The optimal conditions for breeding the fleas were temperatures of 27 to 30 C and humidity of around 90 percent. Singapore's climate met all of these requirements."
Another document preserved in a Japanese archive showed that Japanese military "researchers" had successfully isolated a new virus from rats in Singapore and planned to transport it to Unit 731's headquarters in Harbin.
Lim said the virus was not originally native to Singapore but had been deliberately cultivated and introduced by the Japanese military. The Japanese Imperial Army recorded the body temperatures, symptoms and other experimental data of 70 test subjects in detail.
"The documentary examines in depth the crucial role Singapore played in the broader biological warfare operation," Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, told the Global Times. "This not only expands the geographical scope of research into Unit 731's criminal activities, but also makes one point clear: This history cannot simply be characterized as a dispute between China and Japan. At its core, it was a transnational crime done by Japanese imperial expansion."
Dudden also pointed to the testimony of Hideo Shimizu, a former teenage recruit of Unit 731 who appeared in the documentary. Accounts by those who directly witnessed the unit's activities demonstrate that "the work of exposing this dark history is far from over," she said.
The documentary also highlights the stark disparity in postwar accountability.
After World War II, the victorious Allied powers conducted international trials of leading Nazi war criminals and criminal organizations in Nuremberg, Germany. Yet many of Unit 731's "executioners" returned to Japanese society, where they resumed ordinary careers in medicine and other professions.
"In a sense, this forces all of us to ask: How could a person commit such horrifying crimes, then return home and continue to act as a caring partner, a kind friend or a responsible parent?" Dudden said.
Understand history, learn from it
As of press time, "Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments" has attracted more than 1.13 million views on YouTube and other platforms, with the figure rising.
Its reception raises a broader question: Why has a history rooted in wartime Asia resonated so strongly with audiences across national borders?
"Many people outside China know little or nothing about this history," Dudden said. "For a long time, international understanding of Unit 731 has not merely contained blind spots. It has been marked by widespread historical ignorance - people simply do not know this history."
Dudden cited an example from the university where she teaches. An accomplished professor who held a doctorate from Kyoto University and had spent years living and working in Japan was stunned after watching the documentary.
"I grew up in Bosnia and worked and lived in Japan for many years. My own grandparents died in Nazi concentration camps, yet I had never heard of this history," the professor said.
The professor urged Dudden to introduce the documentary in her classes and help disseminate the historical truth about Unit 731 because "everyone can and must understand this history and learn from it."
At the same time, Dudden emphasized that "understanding history and learning historical knowledge does not mean hating Japan or the Japanese people."
Asked by the Global Times what lessons remembering and reflecting on history can offer for preventing past tragedies from recurring and safeguarding peace and justice, amid Japan's accelerating rightward shift and mounting conflicts worldwide, Dudden said that "choosing silence in the face of atrocities is, to some extent, tantamount to abetting evil."
"Collective numbness and inaction can all too easily give rise to further harm. If humanity is unwilling to reflect together and defend our shared human values, similar tragedies will very likely happen again. Therein lies the answer," Dudden said. 
For historians, years of work with archival materials are essential to identifying decisive evidence and exposing the falsehoods of historical denialists, Dudden said.
"But the challenge remains: Distorted and sanitized narratives have already hardened into mainstream opinion in some countries," she noted. "From this perspective, the historical truth about Unit 731, including that presented in CNA's documentary, deserves to be disseminated widely."
Da Zhigang, a research fellow at the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies of the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the Imperial Japanese Army's germ warfare, chemical warfare and other atrocities were not confined to China.
They also spread across Southeast Asia and the Pacific theater, inflicting profound suffering on people in numerous countries, he said.
Da said the Japanese government has long pursued historical revisionism by deliberately confining its wartime crimes to a bilateral China-Japan framework. It has even substituted concepts and reversed right and wrong, portraying a deliberately launched war of aggression as "an act of self-defense under a complex international environment," he said.
Such narratives seek to reduce the perceived geographical scope of Japan's atrocities and dilute its responsibility for wartime crimes, Da noted.
"Japan's historical revisionism is, in essence, a flagrant violation of the spirit of the UN Charter, international human rights norms and the principles of Japan's own Constitution," Da said. 
"The current Sanae Takaichi administration uses AI and other means to manipulate public opinion, continually poisoning the Japanese public's understanding of history and fundamentally distorting the purpose of peace education," Da said. 
"This erroneous view of history is highly transmissible and has serious spillover effects. It undermines the foundations of Japan's relations with regional countries and risks triggering a chain of negative consequences with lasting repercussions," the expert warned.
Many Asia-Pacific countries share memories of suffering under Japanese militarism as well as a strong emotional resonance rooted in that history. This provides a solid foundation for building a multilateral system of historical accountability, Da said.
Victimized countries across the region should preserve their shared historical memory, work together to expose false narratives promoted by Japan's right wing and fully restore the historical record of Japanese aggression, he added. Such efforts would provide a firm historical basis for upholding regional peace and justice.
For Lim, turning that goal into reality requires overcoming serious obstacles. The countries of Southeast Asia were ruled by different colonial powers during the war, and their archives were consequently preserved in different languages. Records relating to Singapore and Malaysia were largely written in English under British colonial rule, those in Indonesia in Dutch, and those in Vietnam in French.
Already scarce documents are therefore scattered across different countries and divided by linguistic barriers, leaving researchers with very limited material, Lim added.
"Unit 731's germ warfare, human experimentation and other crimes are not only a source of pain for China. They are a shared trauma for all Asian countries that suffered Japanese aggression, and for humanity as a whole," Lim said. "Researching this history is therefore not the responsibility of any one country, but a common responsibility of the international community."
Lim called on countries to strengthen archival sharing and academic cooperation, break down linguistic and national barriers, and jointly uncover more historical truths that have remained buried.
"More than 80 years after the war, reviving the collective memory of affected countries is essential to safeguarding peace," Lim said. "Only by facing history squarely and reflecting on it can we prevent such tragedy from recurring and build a solid foundation for peace." 
。关于做好2024年“五一”假期及春夏季新冠病毒感染等重点传染病疫情防控工作的通知　　各省、自治区、直辖市及新疆生产建设兵团联防联控机制（领导小组、指挥部），国务院联防联控机制各成员单位：　　为贯彻落实党中央、国务院决策部署，进一步做好2024年“五一”假期及春夏季新冠病毒感染（以下简称新冠）等重点传染病疫情防控工作，保持全国疫情形势总体平稳，确保人民群众健康平安过节，现将有关要求通知如下：　　一、高度重视“五一”假期及春夏季疫情防控工作　　当前，我国传染病疫情形势总体平稳。新冠病毒JN.1变异株引起的全球疫情已过高峰并下降至较低水平，我国新冠疫情持续保持低水平波浪式流行态势，但新冠病毒仍在变异，疫情仍存在一定的反复性。

二 | 我国部分传染病防控面临新情况新特征，部分地区流感疫情仍未回落到往年同期水平，百日咳疫情呈现快速增长趋势，手足口病报告病例数明显增加，多病共同流行成为常态。全球多个国家和地区出现登革热、麻疹等疫情反弹，境外疫情输入我国风险增加。“五一”假期人员流动性上升和聚集性活动增加，可能加大疫情传播风险，防控任务艰巨复杂。各地各部门要高度重视，始终把新冠等重点传染病防控工作摆在突出位置，做到思想不懈怠、防控不放松、措施不加码，坚决盯紧看牢、常抓不懈，扎实推进各项防控措施落地落细，继续保持疫情形势总体平稳，为经济社会发展创造良好环境。　　二、加强口岸疫情防控　　各口岸要密切关注全球新冠、登革热、麻疹、疟疾等重点传染病疫情，尤其是我周边国家和地区及重点来源国传染病疫情情况，按照“一国一策、一病一策、一口岸一策”原则，不断完善相关方案预案。疾控、卫生健康、海关等部门要加强信息共享，及时掌握新冠等重点传染病疫情流行趋势、病原变异等情况。落实入境人员体温监测、医学巡查、流行病学调查、医学排查等措施，做好入境人员新冠病毒核酸抽检，加强对疫情高发国家和地区入境人员、健康申报异常人员的卫生检疫，对检疫异常人员发放《就诊方便卡》，做好健康风险告知。引导出境人员关注目的地疫情动态，做好个人防护；对入境人员加强健康宣教，引导做好自我健康监测，出现不适症状及时就诊。　　三、加强监测预警和调查处置　　各地要持续落实病例报告、发热门诊、哨点医院、病毒变异等新冠多渠道监测和呼吸道传染病多病原监测，及时掌握我国呼吸道传染病的流行特征和病原谱变化。各地要结合春夏季传染病流行特点及本地实际开展监测预警工作，强化手足口病等肠道传染病学校聚集性疫情监测，百日咳疫情上升地区要加强病原学监测和分析，登革热、疟疾等蚊媒传染病输入疫情上升地区要加强病媒生物监测。各地要动态开展疫情形势综合分析研判，及时掌握传染病疫情流行特征和发展态势。发生疫情后及时做好调查处置工作，加强病例流行病学调查，按相关要求依法依规报告传染病疫情信息，做好聚集性疫情和突发公共卫生事件的报告，做到早发现、早报告和早处置。　　四、加强传染病医疗救治　　各地要根据本地春夏季传染病流行形势做好医疗救治应对准备，加强医务人员培训，提高传染病早期识别和诊疗能力。加强医疗服务管理，强化落实首诊负责制，做好“五一”假期期间发热门诊、急诊等医疗应急值守安排，选派经验丰富的医务人员值班值守，确保医疗服务平稳有序。

三 | 　　五、加强预防接种　　各地要持续做好预防接种工作，将国家免疫规划疫苗接种作为当前的重点工作，围绕国家免疫规划疫苗接种率不低于90%的核心目标，加强接种率监测评估，认真组织开展查漏补种工作。进一步优化预防接种服务，促进适龄儿童及时、全程接种百白破、麻腮风等国家免疫规划疫苗。

四 | 继续推进重点人群接种含XBB变异株抗原成分的新冠病毒疫苗。严格做到“三查七对一验证”，做好冷链管理，加强疑似预防接种异常反应的监测和处置，确保接种安全。　　六、加强重点机构疫情防控　　各地要加强养老、托幼、学校、社会福利等机构的疫情防控，督促做好日常防护和健康监测。指导托幼机构、学校落实好晨午检、健康教育、环境消毒、因病缺勤缺课追踪与登记等措施，加强食品和饮用水管理，严防聚集性疫情发生，切实保障学生健康和校园安全。指导养老机构、社会福利机构加强外来人员探视、老年人和儿童回家及返院管理，出现发热、咳嗽、腹泻等症状人员要及时就医排查，降低疫情引入和传播风险。　　七、加强旅途和旅游活动疫情防控　　各地要指导客运场站根据客流变化，及时增加或开放进出站和安检通道，引导乘客有序进出站、候乘车（船、机），加强客运场站、高速公路服务区和收费站、交通运输工具清洁消毒和通风换气，倡导旅客进入客运场站和乘坐公共交通工具时科学佩戴口罩。各地旅游景区要及时动态疏导客流，避免室内场馆大规模人员聚集，做好室内旅游场所和室内场馆等人员密集、空间密闭场所的清洁消毒、通风换气等工作，适当增加经常接触的公共用品和设备设施的清洁消毒频次。住宿、餐饮服务单位要加强食品卫生和安全管理，确保公共用品用具、饮用水、食品等卫生质量符合相关标准，有效降低传染病发生的风险。　　八、加强宣传教育　　各地要及时、准确、客观发布疫情信息，做好科学解读和健康提示，有针对性地开展防控知识宣传和健康教育，大力倡导健康生活方式，努力提高群众自我防护和及时就诊意识。引导出行人员提前了解目的地传染病流行情况，做好出发前、旅途中和到达目的地后的防护准备，落实科学佩戴口罩、勤洗手、防蚊虫叮咬等防护措施。倡导有发热、咳嗽等呼吸道症状人员避免参加集体活动或前往人群密集场所。

五 | 密切关注舆情动态和社会热点，及时发布权威信息解疑释惑。　　九、加强组织领导　　各地要压紧压实各级党委政府、部门、机关和企事业单位、个人在疫情防控中的“四方责任”，将新冠疫情防控中的好机制和好做法常态化、制度化，继续坚持联防联控和多病同防，强化平急转换。加强“五一”假期值班值守，建立完善轮班轮休制度，做好医疗物资供应保障。结合本地实际加强春夏季传染病防控工作部署，盯住关键环节、突出防控重点，一旦发现疫情及时报告、快速反应、有效处置。开展疫情防控工作的全面自查，及时排查防控风险点和薄弱环节，及时补齐短板漏洞，坚决防止由于工作不细、管理不善引发聚集性疫情，切实保障人民群众生命安全和身体健康。