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Editorial: China, Japan and the history war

Historians from China and Japan -- 10 on each side -- were to meet yesterday in Beijing as a follow-up to an undertaking by their governments to improve relations through shared historical research.

This came in response to cooling ties between the two governments over former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni shrine and other symbolically offensive actions and statements by Japanese politicians and educators.

The sight of academics sitting around a table talking about history may lead some to believe that detente is on the way, but in truth it is hard to see the political or scholastic point of any of this.

Japanese atrocities in China before and during World War II are well documented. As a free society, Japan's liability for war crimes and exploitation of "comfort women" are regularly and publicly canvassed, if not always to the satisfaction of litigants or the Chinese government, or indeed, to other Asian and Western victims of Japanese cruelties more than six decades ago.

There is, however, a stink of hypocrisy on the part of the Chinese here, and this, together with the absurd assumption that the Chinese historians will present their cases as independent experts, suggests that the meetings will offer no political solution, much less a scholastic one.

Ever claiming to be the wronged party, China regularly displays considerable discomfort at the prospect of the airing of its own ample amounts of dirty laundry -- in particular laundry that was soiled in the last two decades. The interesting thing about this is that in both cases -- Japanese wartime butchery or Chinese postwar demagoguery -- the victims have almost all been Chinese nationals. This nasty little fact speaks volumes.

Japan's problem is not that these histories are unwritten; it is that the politics of school curriculums shield Japanese students from unpalatable truths about Japanese conduct in the region and from the reasons why Japanese nationals are held in suspicion by many older people from countries that were occupied by or fought against the Japanese.

China's problem -- or, better expressed, the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) problem -- is that it uses history as a weapon against Japanese arrogance and insensitivity while pretending that it has no responsibility for the millions of Chinese who were exterminated by people hailed as national icons by these same historians. With such double standards in play, what possible space can there be for rigorous intellectual discussion?

As an example, ill-fated Straits Times reporter Ching Cheong (程翔) dared to look into the exact fate of former CCP general secretary Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), and for his trouble he is now cooling his heels in a Chinese gulag on the laughable charge of spying for Taiwan. Dare we ask if these historians from Japan (forget China's) will leap to the defense of a journalist performing historical research?

Ruled like a colony for much of its modern history, Taiwan is the only third party in the region to have been molested by both of these countries, and yet harbors attachment to both. Taiwanese historians who might be hoping for some degree of parity in all of this diplomatic maneuvering among Chinese and Japanese academics should expect to come away disappointed. Certainly, these historians should not be expected to deliver a consensus on how both countries treated Taiwan -- and even if they did, it would most likely be worthless.

But this is just what one should expect when historians act in the service of disingenuous governments that trade in populist stupidity.
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