Under an urban renewal program, Dalian recently began demolishing hundreds of decaying colonial-era villas that housed Japanese upper-class families and commissioned officers. Over the protests of historians, a third of the 600 structures have been destroyed, with piles of brick and jagged mortar lining both sides of Harbin Street in the Nanshan neighborhood.
"Scholars can say, let's keep these structures, but nobody else would dare advocate for this," said Lu Wei, a professor of construction at Dalian University of Technology. "Those homes built during Japanese occupation -- for average people, it's unsafe to say we should keep them. Your neighbors can accuse you of being overly pro-Japanese."
Sitting on the stoop of her Nanshan apartment building, Li Pingwei said the Japanese revival has been good for her family's jade business. She has even learned to speak the language. But she remains bitter.
"The Japanese were so cruel to the Chinese," she said. "They may be creating jobs in Dalian, but I will hate them forever."
Some of Dalian's young people agree, preferring to weather a less lucrative Chinese-speaking job market than learn Japanese.
"They refuse to study the language because of what the Japanese military did to our forefathers," said Li Zhaogang, a professor at Dalian University of Foreign Language's school of software. "They still harbor this national hatred.
"We say to the Japanese, 'Come and do business, but don't expect us to forget.' "
A century ago, two foreign empires battled over control of Dalian, which was prized for its ice-free deep-water port.
In Russia, the city was known as Dalny and Czar Nicholas II sought to duplicate the success of Vladivostok, a major Russian port on the Pacific. But after years of war, the Japanese army eventually prevailed in 1905 and the city was renamed Dairen.
For four decades, Japanese engineers rebuilt the seaside gem, which on many maps of the era was shown as part of imperial Japan, with a population of 300,000 Japanese.
Modeling the city after their homeland, for example, they built the Dalian train station, still considered among China's best, as a replica of Ueno Station in Tokyo.
Between 1931 and 1945, when the Japanese army was accused of conducting civilian executions elsewhere in China, most notably in the city of Nanjing, Dalian was spared.
