Former war enemies China and Japan have embarked on forward looking diplomacy to sustain the recent thaw in their frosty bilateral ties. But differing interpretations of history and harsh perceptions of each other are holding the two neighbours back from diplomatic rapprochement. Even as Prime Minster Wen Jiabao is making headlines with his visit to Japan this week — the first by a Chinese premier in nearly seven years — there loom numerous rifts in mutual understanding and knowledge about their most recent history.

What really happened during Japan’s invasion of China (1931-45) is still a hotly debated issue and the controversies seem only to multiply as the two countries approach the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre in December.

While Beijing claims 35 million Chinese were killed or injured by invading Japanese imperial army troops, including 300,000 deaths during the 1937 “rape of Nanjing”, Japanese historians dispute these figures.

Japanese nationalists are going ahead with plans to make a documentary, which puts forward their own version of the Nanjing event. The film, entitled ‘The Truth About Nanjing’, will insist that the massacre never took place, despite evidence presented at the post-war Tokyo war crimes tribunals that Japanese soldiers slaughtered at least 142,000 people when they invaded Nanjing. Chinese authorities are planning to respond with a film of their own, based on Iris Chang’s best-selling book, ‘The Rape of Nanking’. In addition, an international version of the Nanjing massacre is in the making as teams of American, Canadian and British directors are all working on films recreating the event.

The first one, a documentary called Nanking, which premiered at the Hong Kong Film Festival in the last week of March, appears to establish China’s claims to historical truth. Interspersed with interviews of 22 survivors of the massacre, the documentary recounts history through the eyes of expatriates who tried to protect city inhabitants by setting up a “safety zone” for them. Growing international attention to an event of Chinese history, which is not well known outside Asia, has been welcomed by Chinese academics. What is more, Beijing has tried to use the recent international outcry over Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its coercion of thousands of Asian women as sex slaves during the World War II to magnify its demands for historical justice.

“The issue of ‘comfort women’ is not the only thorny question in the history of east Asia,” says Zhou Yongsheng, an expert on Japanese studies at the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. “There are also questions about Japan’s attitude towards the war, the Yasukuni shrine and most importantly, unresolved territorial claims, none of which can be separated from history.” But while territorial claims can be disputed, the question of owning up to historical truth has a moral side to it that can be hard to disregard, argues Yuan Peng, an analyst at China International Relations Research Institute.

Indeed, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s recent comments denying that the country has forced thousands of women to work as sex slaves have galvanised public opinion across continents. Protests and demands towards Japan to own up to its guilt have been heard from the Netherlands to Australia and the US. Beijing has been particularly keen on following the waves that the ‘comfort women’ controversy has been creating in the US, Japan’s most important ally. “Now that the issue has become one of international concern, we can expect that history would be also a factor in Washington’s policy-making towards Japan,” reckons Zhang Guoqing, an American studies expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Chinese academics and media have become increasingly uneasy about their own lack of understanding of the other country. Sixty years after the war, China’s youth know a lot about the crimes committed by Japanese invaders but close to nothing about the long history of relations between China and Japan going back thousands of years or about the economic aid Japan provided China during its reforms. Trying to bridge the gap, China’s state broadcaster CCTV has produced a new series on Japan aiming to show a more balanced view of the country ahead of Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to Tokyo this week. Yet even the programme presenter Bai Yansong, a well-known TV personality, has confessed how difficult it would be to change people’s perceptions.

Academic Wang Jinsi says China’s studies of Japan can’t rival Japan’s excellent research of both ancient and modern China. While Japan has a few hundred thousand researchers working in China studies, Beijing has less than half that number. According to Wang, a member of the China-Japan Academic Association. “Japan’s research on China is very modern and focused on practical use,” he says. “By contrast, our own studies of their country are more to criticism rather than practicality.’’ — IPS