The thunder of firecrackers ushered in the Year of the Rat on Thursday, but millions of Chinese spent a cold holiday as teams fought to restore power knocked out by the worst winter weather in a century.
Zhou Fenying is a living witness to the dark history that still poisons China's relations with Japan more than 60 years after World War II. When Zhou was 22, Japanese soldiers came to her village in eastern China, grabbed her and her sister-in-law and carted them off to a military brothel, she says.