More than 20 years of Sino-Japanese cooperation and China’s efforts – such as its national implementation mechanism – to deal with the legacy of abandoned chemical weapons have resulted in great progress, and have been essential to the disposal of weapons. In this article, Wanglai Gao discusses how the Chinese experience has shown that the best way to deal with the legacy of abandoned chemical weapons is to cooperate with the former enemy and remedy the past by investing for the future.