Shanghai (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Much of the history of the Twentieth Century has gone missing from Chinese textbooks; nothing is said about the 1989 pro-democracy movement, zero about the millions who died as a result of the famine caused by the Communist Party's agricultural policies during the Great Leap Forward, and even less is mentioned about the attacks by the People's Liberation Army against India and Vietnam.

Since Chinese textbooks must be approved by central school authorities, only those that bear their mark of approval can be printed and distributed to classrooms.

According to Yu Maochun, Associate Professor of History at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis (Maryland), "the rising nationalist tide has made rewriting history the national pastime of the Chinese" and Japan is the preferred whipping boy.

In the textbooks, all those who died in the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945 are celebrated as heroes who "gloriously died" for China.

In a textbook for eight graders used in Shanghai schools, the Japanese are described as "bandits who killed and wounded at least 35 million people".

The paragraph that ends the chapter on the war says that "wherever the Japanese army passed through its soldiers burnt, murdered and pillaged. There is no crime that they did not commit".

Recent violent, anti-Japanese demonstrations have also been fed by Chinese criticism of Japanese textbooks which tend to whitewash the crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in China.

Sin-ming Shaw, a Chinese student attending Oxford University, said that the "historical distortions contained in Japanese textbooks seem to stem from Tokyo's reluctance and shame to admit its past, whilst those in Chinese textbooks are designed to preserve the role of the Communist party. Hiding the truth is in both cases politically motivated".