There is public outrage in China over what official media are calling a three day "orgy" involving 400 male Japanese tourists and 500 Chinese prostitues.   The debauch, in mid-September at a 5 star hotel in the southern industrial city of Zhuhai is being used by Chinese authorities to whip up anti-Japanese sentiment amid tensions between the two Asian giants on a number of issues.      Beijing and Tokyo are competing to be the terminus of a Russian oil pipeline and the two governments are at odds after the discovery of chemical weapons abandoned by the Japanese in northern China during the Second World War.   Beyond these specific irritants is the wider competition between China and Japan for economic mastery and political influence within Asia.                  In this climate, what happened at the Zhuhai hotel between Sept. 16 and 18 was heaven-sent for the Beijing authorities to stir up nationalist sentiments.     The Beijing government has for decades maintained a steady stream of anti- Japanese propaganda. There are regular rebroadcasts of films dealing with the 1931-45 Japanese invasion and occupation of much of China and of atrocities such as the "Nanking massacre" carried out during the period.                   Chinese official media also latch on to even the slightest indications that   militarist sentiments remain alive in Japan. The rightwing Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, who has called the Nanking massacre a fabrication, is a favourite target. There is always an official protest from Beijing when Japanese prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi makes an annual visit to the national Yusukuni shrine, among whose dead are a few executed war criminals.          On its side, Japan has done little to try to erode or counter Chinese suspicions by, for example, giving an unequivocal apology for the actions of its military regime in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, the community of Japanese official- dom often displays as negative an attitude toward China as the Chinese government shows toward Japan.                                                                  In this setting, it does not take much to excite animosities. The current spike on the graph of ill feeling began in August when one man died and another 40 were injured when mustard-gas weapons abandoned by the Japanese army were found on a construction site in the northern Chinese city of Qiqihar.      This discovery added to a lengthy and bitter dispute between Tokyo and Beijing over Japan's wartime chemical and biological weapons operations in China. Japan has taken legal responsibility for recovering and clearing away these weapons which Tokyo estimates, probably conservatively, to number about 700,000.  But Tokyo has stood firmly against paying compensation for the estimated 2,000 people who have died since 1945 after coming into contact with abandoned chemical weapons. It has offered only "investigation expenses" or "condolence money."    That position was challenged on Monday when a Tokyo court ruled the Japanese government is responsible for injuries or fatalities caused by the abandoned chemical weapons and should pay compensation as well as retrieve the munitions.                                                    In mid-September, a petition with official Chinese government blessing of about one million signatures covering about 4,000 pages was delivered to the  Japanese embassy in Beijing demanding Japan take responsibility for compensating victims of  the chemical weapons. All this context gives a manufactured tone to Chinese popular outrage at the Zhuhai sex orgy.                                 In the last decade or so, China'a better hotels catering to foreigners and wealthy Chinese have become a magnet for young prostitutes, often working in the sex trade only part time to earn extra money. Prostitution is illegal in China but the police not only usually turn a blind eye to the trade, they often control it  and take a rake-off. And Chinese male tour groups hitting the bars and clubs of Thailand often behave in the same way as the Japanese men apparently did in Zhuhai. So there is no real reason for the Chinese to be out- raged other than because of the historical nerve ends the story pricks.         Beijing might well feel it has won a useful moral victory over Tokyo in this affair, but it has also further embedded resentments that should have been allowed to wither away decades ago.

                                                                Vancouver  Sun