The money, promised by Japan two months ago, would be paid to the victims of an accident in northeast China in August when workers dug up a cache of World War II-era weapons left by fleeting Japanese armies, Xinhua news agency said.

While noting that the money was on the way, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao was quoted by Xinhua as saying China would continue to urge Japan to clean up the weaponry left in the mainland for nearly 60 years.

More than 700,000 chemical bombs and grenades are estimated by Japan to have been abandoned in China by its armies.

Chinese experts dispute this figure, saying as many as two million are still buried, giving China the world's largest stockpile of abandoned chemical weapons.

Since beginning work to search and destroy these old weapons about a decade ago, Japan has retrieved about 36,000 chemical bombs on the mainland, according to previous reports.

A Japanese team was recently in Qiqihar, the location of the August accident, to dispose of the newly-discovered weapons there.

Sino-Japanese tensions, never far below the surface of the tortured bilateral relationship, have flared up again in recent months.

One reason for the renewed tension is public outrage in China over a sex orgy in September that implicated hundreds of Japanese tourists and Chinese prostitutes, and happened to coincide with a sensitive war-time anniversary.

WAR.WIRE