Spring Airlines has cancelled a campaign offering reduced tickets for flights to Japan on Thursday due to mounting public pressure, only a few days after it launched the promotion.

The Shanghai-based budget carrier started to offer reduced tickets for flights between Shanghai and the Japanese prefecture of Saga on Monday.

On Tuesday, the airline started offering reduced tickets for flights between Shanghai and Japan's Kagawa prefecture.

The campaign was launched at a time when there is a sharp decline of Chinese passengers flying to Japan, amid the escalating tensions between the two countries over the Diaoyu Islands.

The campaign sparked heated debate online, with many netizens angry about the promotion.

A report on Chinese website sohu.com about the promotion was read by more than 40,000 netizens, and commented more than 11,000 times.

Almost all the comments strongly opposed the campaign, and some of them even said that they wouldn't fly with Spring Airlines in the future, China National Radio reported.

"Originally, we wanted to cut down or stop flights to the two Japanese destinations to save losses, rather than offer promotional tickets, but considering that the cancellation of the flights would cause inconvenience to business travelers between the two destinations, in addition to the local prefecture governments' insistence in keeping the flights running, we decided to do the promotion together with the local governments of Saga and Kagawa," said Zhang Wu'an, a spokesman for the airline.

wang_ying@chinadaily.com.cn