Key dates in a bitter relationship:
1894: Japan invades China, occupies Taiwan.
1900: Japanese forces intervene with western powers against the Boxer Rebellion in China.
1931: Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in northeastern China. Japanese occupation of Taiwan.
1937: Full-scale Japanese invasion of mainland China. In one episode which becomes known as the "rape of Nanjing," Japanese troops carry out horrific atrocities in that city. According to Chinese and other reports over 300,000 inhabitants are massacred.
1941: Japan attacks the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. The Americans accept the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek among their Asian allies.
1945: The war's end brings disastrous defeat for Japan. China recovers Taiwan. The US obliges Japan to adopt a pacifist constitution, but leaves the emperor in place.
1949: Mao Zedong brings Communism to power in mainland China. Chiang Kai Shek retreats to Taiwan, where he sets up a nationalist government.
1950-53: The Korean War, directly involving China, the US, the Soviet Union and the two Koreas, provides a boost to Japan's rapidly recovering economy.
1972: China and Japan establish diplomatic relations. Six years later they sign a peace and friendship treaty.
1992: Emperor Akihito of Japan makes a pathbreaking visit to China. In 1998, Chinese president Jiang Zemin returns the compliment.
2001: China protests when a Japanese school textbook plays down the scale of Japan's atrocities, and when prime minister Junichiro Koizumi pays the first of several visit to a shrine housing the remains of Japanese war criminals.
In October, however, Koizumi visits a Chinese war memorial and expresses "mourning, apology and remorse".
2004: In a sign of Japan's increasingly assertive military role alongside the US, the country sends a small force to Iraq.
2005: Violent protests in China over another Japanese textbook which is seen as minimising wartime crimes. Koizumi continues his practice of visiting the Yasukuni shrine.
October 2006: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a conservative appointed in September, sets a visit to Beijing.
