A Chinese military-themed computer game named Glorious Mission Online will release an update on August 1, the South China Morning Post reports, allowing users to take part in missions related to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea.
Whle nationalistic video games are hardly rare (take, for example, Call of Duty or America's Army), the move may prove especially controversial. The East China Sea islands have been at the center of a bitter territorial dispute between Japan and China for over a hundred years, and tensions over the islands flared recently, helping to spark widespread anti-Japanese protests in mainland China.
A press release for the game says:
“Players entering the game will fight alongside Chinese armed forces and use their weapons to tell the Japanese that ‘Japan must return our stolen territory!’”
More controversial still, China's People’s Liberation Army reportedly helped develop the game, placing it within a propaganda war that has seen huge advertisements taken out in the New York Times by the Chinese government, and offers to "buy" the island by Tokyo's nationalistic governor Shintaro Ishihara.
Here's a trailer for the game, via the Washington Post's World Views blog: