The Japanese are fighting back:
The Japanese Government is to conduct a survey of bias and propaganda in Chinese school textbooks to counter Chinese claims that it distorts its own history.
Nobutaka Machimura, the Japanese Foreign Minister, announced the survey yesterday after an inconclusive summit on Saturday between Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, and President Hu Jintao of China.
“From the perspective of a Japanese person, Chinese textbooks appear to teach that everything the Chinese Government has done has been correct,” Mr Machimura told a television chat show.
“There is a tendency toward this in any country, but the Chinese textbooks are extreme in the way they uniformly convey the ‘Our Country is Correct’ point of view.”
Are they going to dare mention Tibet? Highly unlikely: the Chinese don’t take kindly to insinuations about what does and what doesn’t constitute part of the People’s Republic.
On August 31, 2000, the Chinese government banned a Matsushita plant from selling its mobile phones in China for a full year because its phone software displayed the abbreviation, roc (an acronym for the Republic of China) when calling Taiwan. Matsushita claimed that this was an inadvertent mistake, and recalled the four models of telephones with the offending software. The company published apologies in the People’s Daily and 29 other newspapers. This contrition did not convince the government to remove the ban, however.
A few sharp reminders about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution might be salutary, though.
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