People visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in Nanjing in East China's Jiangsu Province on Sunday. According to China's official records, more than 300,000 civilians and soldiers died in the massacre, which began on December 13, 1937. Photo: CFP

A historical record from Jilin Provincial Archives revealing Japan's war crimes is displayed. Photo: Chang Meng/GT

Top Party and national leaders are to attend a memorial Monday to mark the 77th anniversary of the July 7 Incident which marked the beginning of War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

Such a high-profile memorial will warn people that history should be treated with the right attitude after Japan has shown obvious signs of a shift away from the path of peaceful development, analysts say.

Along with government officials, representatives from different walks of life will attend the memorial, the Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.

The memorial is at the Museum of the War of the Chinese People's Resistance against Japanese Aggression in Beijing, near Lugou Bridge, site of the incident.

On the night of July 7, 1937, Japanese troops fired on Chinese troops near the bridge after the Chinese army refused Japanese demands to enter Beijing to search for a Japanese soldier they claimed was missing. Chinese troops fought back, marking the start of the eight-year war.

Su Zhiliang, professor of Japanese studies at Shanghai Normal University, said that national leaders usually only attend such memorials every five or 10 years.

The larger-scale memorial this time is down to the tense situation in Northeast Asia and the current relationship between China and Japan, he said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet last week adopted a resolution to reinterpret Article 9 of Japan's Pacifist Constitution, which will allow the country to exercise the right of collective self-defense.

This new policy means that Northeast Asia is at a critical juncture, so the time is ripe to look back at history, Su said. "The memorial will not only remind Chinese people of the war but also send a warning that history can repeat itself."

More memorial services are expected this year.

In February, China's top legislature set September 3 as a national day to mark the war victory, and December 13 as a national memorial day for Nanjing Massacre victims.

A website, cngongji.cn, designed to promote commemoration of the Nanjing Massacre, was launched on Sunday.

The website in three languages - Chinese, Japanese and English - is sponsored by the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and Xinhua. Russian, French, German and Korean editions will be added by December 13.

Previously, memorials to the war and the Nanjing Massacre were mostly locally organized, but now they are upgraded to national level, said Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

National memorials can unite national spirit and serve to deter right-wing forces in Japan, which have tried to deny certain historical facts, he told the Global Times.

In the countdown to July 7, China made public imperial Japanese wartime atrocities through the release of archived documents derived from the confessions of convicted war criminals.

Starting last Thursday, the State Archives Administration published one confession every day from 45 Japanese war criminals, convicted by military tribunals in China after World War II.

Jilin Provincial Archives also released 450 wartime newsletters.

The 450 files involved the contents of 45,000 letters written in Japanese from 1937-45 under a postal screening system. Japan's Kwantung Army would secretly check mail, phone calls and publications of Japanese soldiers and expatriates in China, Chinese nationals and foreigners, especially diplomats and missionaries.

Content that depicted the violent crimes of the Japanese army or those that might jeopardize its puppet Manchurian regime in Changchun would be archived and then redacted, smeared or destroyed.

The files detailed war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese army. This includes the ransack and murder of tens of thousands of Chinese people, information about chemical and germ warfare and secret military projects, and conspiring to control and enslave Belarusian emigrants in Northeast China to invade the Far East region of Russia.

In a letter sent by a French newspaper in December 1938, the newspaper reported that the Japanese army had used poisonous gas along the route from Shanghai to northern Shanxi Province.

Jiang Lifeng, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the files are "firsthand materials among firsthand materials" as they were written by the invaders themselves and contain historical facts rarely discovered before.

Mu Zhanyi, a deputy director of the archives, said that they plan to digitize 15,000 of its 100,000 Japanese invasion files over the next three years, and he hopes these documents will warn and educate people about war atrocities and help people embrace peace.