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.”

He defended Mr Koizumi against charges that the hour-long summit had achieved nothing. “It was fully significant that the two leaders met and sent a message that the friendship between Japan and China is important.”

Mr Koizumi and Mr Hu avoided mutual recrimination after three weeks of violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China. Mr Koizumi did not repeat a demand for an apology and compensation for damage caused when a mob of young Chinese stoned the Japanese Consulate in Shanghai. Mr Hu adopted a tone of icy politeness. “Japan’s mistaken actions over the issue of history and Taiwan have hurt the feelings of China and related Asian nations,” he said.

There were no significant anti-Japanese demonstrations in China over the weekend, thanks, in part, to stern commentaries in the Chinese media last week and the deployment of 3,000 police to guard the Japanese Consulate, but such pressure has done little to address disagreements between the two sides. These include a dispute over the ownership of the remote Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, Japan’s campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council and its implied opposition to a takeover by China of Taiwan.

However, the issues causing greatest resentment concern interpretations of the Second World War, when the Japanese Imperial Army occupied much of China. Two things especially have enraged Mr Hu: Mr Koizumi’s annual visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where the country’s war dead are enshrined alongside war criminals; and a recent school history textbook playing down Japanese wartime brutality.

Hence Tokyo’s plan to scrutinise Chinese textbooks, which paint a highly self- serving picture of the Communist Party. They dwell on Japanese brutality, but do not mention the millions who died in political purges and the famine that followed Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

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