It’s a lot of fun to rag on Japan for the multiple sins of omission present in its notorious textbooks; some web sites and chat rooms talk of little else aside from Japan’s revisions of history. So it’s refreshing to see an article that looks at how this same practice is applied in China and, most interestingly, Hong Kong.

The doctoring of Japanese school textbooks to omit negative portrayals of its wartime conduct has provoked an outcry in East Asia, but one doesn’t have to look far to discover that every nation has its own version of history.

It also becomes evident that the perfect place to sow the seeds of fervent nationalism is in the classroom with young impressionable minds.

This summer, new Chinese history textbooks for Hong Kong senior secondary school students have hit the shelves. For the first time the texts include events up to the end of the last century – including the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 – under the revised curriculum for Form Four and Five students. Previously, the Hong Kong curriculum only covered the years up to 1976.

Controversy erupted when the contents of the textbooks first came to light a few months ago, with educators accusing the authors of the Hong Kong textbooks of “distorting history” by failing to detail the bloody crackdown by the central government on pro-democracy protesters.

Scholars said this incident showed that textbook writers and publishers had shied away from touching on sensitive issues or producing material which ran against the thinking of the central government on controversial historical events.

But they also noted that the inclusion of at least some detail from the June 4 incident – which is totally absent from mainland textbooks – demonstrated a telling difference between education and textbooks in Hong Kong and across the border.

Most interesting is the description of mainland textbooks that write about Japan as though it poses a clear and present danger. If anyone doubts young Chinese readers aren’t programmed early, they need to wake up.

“The mainland textbooks used sensational wording and bloody photos to recount the crimes the Japanese committed during the war,” he [HK history professor Siu Kam-wah] said.

In the unit devoted to the anti-Japanese war in the history textbook published by People’s Education Publications (Ren min jiao yu chu ban she) for senior secondary school students – the most popular textbook on the mainland – Dr Siu said the text focused on crimes committed by the Japanese through graphic words and pictures.

One paragraph reads: “Wherever the Japanese invaders went, they burned, killed, raped and looted, committing all crimes of sin. In February 1937, after the Japanese troops invaded Nanjing, they carried out a large-scale massacre of the residents of Nanjing. Within six weeks, they had massacred over 300,000 Nanjing residents and unarmed Chinese soldiers. They used various brutal means to carry out the massacre – some were shot, some were stabbed, some were buried alive and some were burned to death.”

In one of the exercises allocated to students, the textbook cited an incident in August 2003, when a worker was killed and more than 40 were poisoned by mustard gas abandoned by the Japanese during the second world war in Northeast China.

Dr Siu said this was aimed at reminding the students that the threat of Japanese militarism still existed today.

Instead of concentrating on the brutal crimes committed by the Japanese during wartime, Hong Kong textbooks focus on the background to the Japanese invasion of China, how the war broke out and the reasons for China’s success.

In other words, the Hong Kong students are being taught to think, those in the mainland are being taught to react. Many Hong Kongers harbor huge resentment against the Japanese, understandably. But a conversation with them hardly resembles one with an impassioned mainlander who grew up on these books.

No big surprise here; anyone watching the anti-Japanese protests or reading about the web sites based purely on Japan hatred know this kind of conditioning had to start at an early age, especially considering the generation bearing the most animosity was born more than 40 years after the “sins” were perpetrated. (And yes, I know, Japanese leaders still go to that wicked shrine!)

As far as textbook doctoring goes, all I can say is, “Ye who are without sin, throw the fist stone.”

Via CDT.

While I tend to shy away from economics, this seemed like an interesting case study in the pitfalls of entering a strategic partnership with China.

THE high point came last November, when Hu Jintao, China’s president, arrived in Latin America to sign a series of trade and investment deals that heralded a new relationship between a rising superpower and a continent eager for economic growth. Nowhere was he greeted more warmly than in Brazil. Its left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sees China as the country’s most promising business partner and an ally in boosting Brazil’s global influence.

Toasting their “strategic partnership”, Lula predicted that trade with China would more than double to $20 billion in three years. China promised to invest $10 billion in Brazil, mostly in infrastructure. Brazil, along with Argentina and Chile, recognised China as a “market economy”, thereby constraining their ability to retaliate against imports. Brazil hoped for Chinese backing for its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

But the euphoria has already given way to a rising fear of Chinese imports, disappointment at the pace of investment and Brazilian anger that their government has weakened the country’s trade defences without getting much in return. China is “not a strategic partner”, says Roberto Giannetti da Fonseca, head of trade issues at FIESP, which represents industry in the state of São Paulo: it merely “wants to buy raw materials with no value added and to export consumer goods.” As for infrastructure investment, Paulo Fleury, a specialist in the subject, detects “lots of smoke and little fire”. Meanwhile, on the diplomatic front, China is opposing Brazil’s joint bid (along with Japan, German and India) for permanent membership of the Security Council, though this is to block Japan, its arch rival, rather than Brazil.

It’s not a disaster. They’re going to work together and they’ll each enjoy measurable trade benefits. But looking back at the elation of only eight months ago, there’s little doubt the bloom is off the rose.

A horrifying story of death in a Chinese drug rehabilitation facility, with disconcerting echoes of Sun’s murder in 2003. It’s a shocker on more than one level – not just the inanity of the rehabilitation program (which boasts a 99 percent failure rate and is marked by torture) but the vulnerability of anyone who falls under the control of a corrupt warden.

The article clearly suggests the state cover-up is already well underway. Let’s hope that, as with Sun, the outrage expressed on the Internet makes a difference.

From the SCMP, a reminder of the perennial plight of China’s migrant laborers.

A dozen Chinese migrant workers fighting for unpaid wages were severely beaten by scores of unidentified men just hours after they told journalists about their ordeal, state media reported Thursday.

Around 40 construction workers briefed reporters about 800,000 yuan that is owed to some 150 employees at a dilapidated construction site in the northern city of Xian on Tuesday, said Xinhua news agency.

Later that day, when 13 of them were negotiating with the manager of the company, they were surrounded by 30 men who started indiscriminately attacking them with metal pipes and bars, the report said.

The identities of the attackers were not immediately known, the manager who was at the scene fled, the report said.

The workers earlier told journalists that local government officials were unsympathetic about their unpaid wages and did virtually nothing to help.

“We don’t know how we are going to pay for our children’s school fees and for the cost of fertilizers and seeds,” a separate local press report quoted them as saying.

Most of the workers have not been paid for more than a year, the report said.

Local governments in China are notorious for ignoring the plight of workers and for refusing to enforce labour laws, siding with employers to encourage more investment in their area.

There have been increasingly frequent incidents of violent revenge on workers and farmers complaining about labour and land rights issues.

Labor relations with Chinese characteristics. They won’t cough up the money to pay the men they hired to do all the work, but I’m sure they pay their goons. How do they go to bed at night?.

Comments, anyone?

It’s certainly been a good month for our friends in the FLG, who can now celebrate the successful defection of another Chinese official who was once dedicated to wiping them out. Now, like Chen Yonglin, Hao Fengjun is their hero.

A former police officer in China’s Gestapo-like “610 office”, which detained and persecuted Falun Gong members, has been granted a protection visa by the Australian Government.

Hao Fengjun fled China in February after being detained for 20 days for speaking out against the torture of Falun Gong practitioners.

He arrived in Australia as a tourist and sought asylum after producing a file of sensitive material downloaded from his work computer.

Mr Hao, 32, was employed by the notorious 610 office — which China refuses to admit exists — to collect and analyse information from operatives spying on Falun Gong and pro-democracy advocates and dissidents overseas.

“I’ve come to Australia with all these secret documents in order to expose the truth in China to Australia and to the world,” Mr Hao told a Senate inquiry last week.

His lawyer, former ACT attorney-general Bernard Collaery, said Mr Hao’s documents showed “near-paranoid” global surveillance and countermeasure activity directed at 14 “evil cults”, including Falun Gong and most Christian groups.

“It’s been enormously valuable in giving us credible information on the focus of the 610 office and the overall objective of state control of perceived dissident activity globally,” Mr Collaery told The Age.

He criticised the Government for granting protection visas to Mr Hao and diplomatic defector Chen Yonglin only after they took their claims of espionage by Chinese operatives in Australia to the media.

“These guys shouldn’t have to go public (and) risk further retribution on their families in China,” Mr Collaery said.

He accused the Australian Government of being more interested in trade than human rights and said Australian intelligence agencies had failed to take proper advantage of the material provided by defectors.

The evil cult must be dancing (or exercising) in the streets. It’s as though they’ve been handed $10 million worth of free public relations, and an endless flow of negative material they can use to embarrass and assail the CCP. Hu must be mighty annoyed.

Oh, the other recipient of free publicity is Australia — bad, bad publicity. I wonder if they have any idea how much damage has been done to their reputation over the past few weeks. People who had no idea about Australia’s obscene immigration policies now know only too well; the Chen story catapulted it to the front pages and to the blogs. Let’s hope the free publicity makes a difference.

This is a story of unique appeal to any expat living outside of the major coastal cities, and it deals with an issue I’ve wondered about: What is life like for a Westerner who moves away from his comfortably American lifestyle to take root in the relatively harsh environment of a distant industrial city in China (distant from the “cool” cities like Shanghai, I mean, where there are lots of other expats). And what if you move there with your family, including young children? What kind of timke do they have?

A Wall Street Journal reporter explores these questions in a piece that should be required reading for all ambitious Americans itching to move with the wife and kids to China, where all the action is. They’d better realize in advance that the “action” as we know it in the West is limited to a few big cities, and if you’re out in the boonies, even in a large city, you may find your social life somewhat limited.

Entertainment in Chongqing is hard to find, the Larsens say. At a drive-through “safari park,” the children looked through car windows and watched tigers devour live chickens tossed from a ranger’s jeep. Enthusiasm about visiting pandas was marred, Ms. Larsen says, by seeing the zoo’s grubby bathrooms. The Larsens attended a Chinese opera, featuring two actors with painted faces, one in a horse costume. Tickets cost only $2, but the family, unimpressed, left at intermission.

One pastime Ms. Larsen has designed for 2-year-old Eliza is spotting dogs near the Hilton hotel. A look down an alley found no animals one Tuesday. After an hour, the little girl had glimpsed two mutts. “He’s going to his house,” Eliza said as a scruffy brown dog jostled along a sidewalk crowded with scaffolding equipment.

Chinese men and women made way for the tot to amble down on the sidewalk. Nearly everyone reacted to the rare sight of a foreign child, pointing, giggling, staring and sometimes touching her. “Eliza’s kind of like the monkey on show,” her mother said.

Ms. Larsen and her daughter took a route back to the Hilton over a pedestrian bridge, where merchants sell sunglasses, combs and belts. One woman’s habit is to thrust a mirror into the little girl’s hand each time they pass, Ms. Larsen says. She says she feels obligated to buy it, even though she is tiring of the routine. At first, the woman asked only one yuan for a mirror, Ms. Larsen says, but now she charges eight yuan, about 99 cents, for each one.

As Ms. Larsen settled up, a middle-aged man bent down for a closer look at Eliza, while a bang-bang man leaned on his bamboo stick and watched. An elderly passerby gave Eliza’s cheek a quick pinch. Everyone tried to be friendly, but Eliza, unsmiling, said nothing. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the new mirror.

The husband is enjoying his work and seems to be realtively well adjusted. The company pays to keep them in the Hilton and the kids go to an exclusive school. But it’s obviously hell for his wife and kids.

It closes with a description of a poem their 6-year-old daughter wrote and taped to the bed stand:

Amarica is my place!
I love Amarica.
It was fun.
It was so fun.
I miss it.
I miss my frieds.
I love Amarica.
Amarica was my place and it still is my place.

I hope they’re okay when they get out; it sounds like they’re struggling.

Anything goes. The lines are open.

Could it grow any worse than it is today? Apparently so. I’m including the entire article because it is so relevant to so many of our recent conversations here.

Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution that plays down this country’s militarist policies in World War II, less than two weeks before ceremonies take place across Asia marking the 60th anniversary of the war’s end on Aug. 15.

Though expressing “regret” for the wartime past, the resolution omitted the references to “invasion” and “colonial rule” that were in the version passed on the 50th anniversary.

The action will most likely be seen by China and Japan’s other Asian neighbors as further proof of growing nationalism here. A right-wing vandal seemed to capture a growing sentiment last week when he tried to scrape off the word “mistake” from a peace memorial in Hiroshima that said of Japan’s war efforts: “Let all the souls here rest in peace, as we will never repeat this mistake.”

But in the weeks leading to Aug. 15, the leaders of China have been making sure that their view of the war, simply called the Anti-Japanese War there, gets across.

China is spending $50 million to renovate a memorial hall for the victims of the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed 100,000 to 300,000 civilians, at a time when details of it are disappearing from Japanese school textbooks. Chinese state television is broadcasting hundreds of programs on China’s resistance against Imperial Japan.

The two countries find themselves playing out old grievances in a new era of direct rivalry for power and influence. Never before in modern times has East Asia had to contend with a strong China and a strong Japan at the same time, and the prospect feeds suspicion and hostility in both countries.

China has experienced 25 years of extraordinary economic growth, deeply extending its influence throughout Asia. But just when China’s moment in the sun seems to be dawning, Japan is asserting itself: seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, transforming its Self-Defense Forces into a real military and revising its war-renouncing Constitution.

Both governments are encouraging nationalism for their own political purposes: China to shore up loyalty as Marxist ideology fades, Japan to overcome long-held taboos against expanding its military. With the impending 60th anniversary, both are trying to forge a future on their version of the past.

In Japan, major newspapers have published articles defending the Class A war criminals convicted by the postwar Tokyo Trials, and a growing number of textbooks whitewash Japan’s wartime conduct. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi makes annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where war dead including Class A war criminals are enshrined.

In China, a new television series called “Hero City” tells of how cities across China “fought bravely against Japan under the leadership of the Communist Party.” In Beijing on Aug. 13, six former Chinese airmen from the Flying Tigers squadron are to recreate an air duel with Japanese fighters.

“On the one hand we have a victim’s mentality, and on the other we don’t see this much smaller country as being worthy of comparison with us,” said Pang Zhongying, a professor of international relations at Nankai University in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin. “The reality is that they must accept the idea of China as a rising military power, and we must accept the idea of Japan becoming a normal nation, whether we like it or not.”

To Japanese conservatives, becoming a normal nation amounts to a revision of the American-imposed peace Constitution that they feel castrated – a term they use deliberately and frequently – their country.

Arguing that Japan must draw closer to the United States, Mr. Koizumi’s government has reinterpreted the Constitution to allow Japanese troops in Iraq and has reversed a longtime ban on the export of arms to join the American missile defense shield. Recent polls show an increasing percentage of Japanese favoring a revision of the Constitution.

The conservative news media have helped demonize China, as well as North Korea, to soften popular resistance to remilitarization. Sankei Shimbun, the country’s most conservative daily, recently ran a series about China called “The Threatening Superpower.”

I said just a few days ago it was a vicious game of tug-of-war, leading to an endless cycle of hatred, blame and counter-blame. I was hoping, however, that the leaders would look for a solution, not a continuation of the name-calling. Apparently I was wrong.

In an act of sweet forebearance, the CCP has released former Xinhua journalist Wu Shishen from his dungeon in Beijing after serving a mere 12 years of his life sentence.

At least in this case, no one can dispute that Wu didn’t deserve his harsh sentence.

Wu was arrested on 26 October 1992 along with his wife, fellow journalist Ma Tao, who spent six years in detention. On the direct orders of then President Jiang Zemin, he was convicted in April 1993 of “illegally divulging state secrets abroad” because he gave a Hong Kong journalist an advance copy of a speech Jiang delivered a few days later.

If that doesn’t merit life in prison and a ruined life for Wu and his wife, what does? But don’t worry that the early release signifies the end of Wu’s travails. He’ll suffer for a long time to come, as well he should.

A onetime journalist with the official news agency Xinhua, Wu will continue to be deprived of his civil and political rights for eight more years – a second sentence that will prevent him from writing articles or speaking in public about matters relating to “national interest.”

Although it is hard to get precise information about his present situation, Wu is currently believed to be in Beijing in the company of friends and colleagues who campaigned for him to be freed.

I actually had an argument with someone today in another thread who insisted the media in the US in the 19th century were treated the way they are today in China. I have only two words, one beginning with a b, the other with an s (or are they one word?).

Thank God for groups like Reporters without Borders, which spurred the international community to put pressure on the CCP to let Wu go.