'Comfort woman', 91, dies in East China

A 91-year-old "comfort woman" died on Saturday in Pingxiang, East China's Jiangxi province, reducing the number of "comfort women" officially registered on China's mainland to less than 20, the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders said on its official website on Monday.

The woman, Liu Rongfang, was made a sex slave by Japanese soldiers in 1944. At first she and some other young women were kept at a shabby house in Xiangtan, Central China's Hunan province and then transferred to Pingxiang.

She managed to escape from the Japanese with two other women later, but never moved back to her hometown. Her elder sister, Liu Cizhen, 93, was also made a "comfort woman", which is a euphemism for women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II.

About half of the 400,000 women in Asia who were forced to serve as "comfort women" during the war were Chinese.