China Accuses Japan of Distorting History
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN Associated Press Writer
(AP) - SHANGHAI, China-Some things you won't find in Chinese history
textbooks: the 1989 democracy movement, the millions who died in a famine
caused by misguided communist policies or China's military attacks on India
and Vietnam.
As China criticizes Japan for new textbooks that critics say minimize wartime
abuses like the Japanese military forcing Asian women into sexual slavery,
Beijing's own schoolbooks have significant omissions about the communist
system's own history and relations with its neighbors.
"With rising Chinese nationalism, the efforts to rewrite history, to
reinterpret history according to the demands of nationalism have become a
major national pastime," said Maochun Yu, a history professor at the U.S.
Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
Experts say China's textbooks are written to heighten a sense of national
victimhood and glorify the Communist Party that seized power in a 1949
revolution and lashes out at any threat to its rule.
The books describe those who died fighting Japan and other outsiders as
having "gloriously sacrificed" themselves for China.
Propaganda paintings reproduced in schoolbooks show Chinese struggling
against foreign invaders - poses imitated by protesters who threw rocks at
the Japanese Embassy in Beijing over the weekend during violent anti-Japanese
demonstrations in several Chinese cities.
An eighth-grade history book used in Shanghai, China's most cosmopolitan
city, repeatedly refers to Japanese by an insulting phrase that roughly
translates as "Jap bandits."
The book focuses on Japanese atrocities and repeats China's claim that 35
million Chinese died or were injured during their 1937-45 war.
"Wherever the Japanese army went, they burned, killed, stole and plundered,"
the book says. "There was no wickedness they didn't commit."
Omissions of major events appear aimed at shoring up China's image of itself
as a non-aggressor, especially since the 1949 revolution.
The books don't mention the brief but bloody 1962 border war with India that
broke out when Chinese troops attacked Indian positions to enforce
territorial claims.
There is nothing on the 1979 war when Chinese troops attacked Vietnam. The
assault was ordered to punish Hanoi for ousting the murderous Khmer Rouge
regime in Cambodia, which was an ally of Beijing.
Also missing:
-The 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrations, when Chinese troops killed
hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed protesters.
-The estimated 30 million Chinese who starved to death during the 1958-61
"Great Leap Forward," revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's attempt to speed up
China's farm and factory output through mass collectivization.
Textbooks gloss over ally North Korea's invasion of South Korea at the start
of the 1950-53 Korean War, a conflict that drew in troops from the United
States and other countries on the side of the South and China's army in
support of the North.
The texts say only that "civil war broke out," without mentioning how it
started. America is portrayed as an invader that forced Beijing to intervene
by threatening Chinese territory.
A seventh-grade text also accuses the U.S. military of using biological
weapons during the Korean War, repeating a claim made by China, North Korea
and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War but never proven.
While Japan's distortions of its history appear driven by a reluctance to
accept shame, China's are aimed at preserving communist rule, said Sin-ming
Shaw, a China scholar at Oxford University in England.
"Not owning up is a calculated political policy," Shaw said.
2005-04-13T17:18:38Z
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羅剎，是一種喜歡吃人、迷惑人的妖怪、惡魔。
自古以來，羅剎便喜歡棲息在人類心中，
據說被詛咒者至死都無法破解，
你的心裡也有羅剎潛伏著...
--
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