THERE are two times of year when crowds swell at the sombre and imposing memorial to victims of the violence carried out here in 1937 by Japanese troops. One is during April’s grave-sweeping holiday, when Chinese families honour deceased ancestors. The other is the period surrounding the December 13th anniversary of the start of the six-week rampage that killed an estimated 300,000 Chinese and is known to history as the Nanjing Massacre. China is never shy about putting its history to political use when it seems expedient, and this year’s anniversary, the 75th, coming at an especially sensitive juncture in China’s ever tense relationship with Japan, is one of those times.

Historians around the world generally accept China’s account of the Nanjing Massacre, and its estimate of the death toll. But there is one conspicuous problem with China’s frequent insistence that Japan (or indeed anyone) “face history squarely”. That would be China’s tendentious handling of its own modern history, replete as it is with famine, persecution and injustice inflicted on its people by a ruling party that resists accountability and can be as stubbornly denialist about its own past as is any nationalist politician in Japan.

The nature of the dilemma can be seen in two new films about a devastating famine that stuck Henan province seven years before the Communist Party gained power. One, a documentary called “The Great Famine of 1942: Human Flesh Became a Commodity Sold by Peddlers”, aired on television. The other, now showing in cinemas across China, is “1942”, the latest big-screen epic from a leading Chinese director, Feng Xiaogang.

Historians have already begun quibbling about matters of accuracy. Both works portray China’s pre-Communist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, and his Kuomintang (KMT) government as feckless and indifferent in their response to the drought-induced famine that, during the war against Japan, sent millions fleeing from Henan towards the neighbouring province of Shaanxi in search of food.

Commentators on Chinese-language online discussion boards lamented the immense suffering that was so gut-wrenchingly portrayed, but some also asked why the Chinese media fail to give similar scrutiny to the nationwide famine of the early 1960s—which was induced more by misguided policy than by drought.

“Just like Mao’s time in the ’60s, two-thirds of the people in our village died of hunger [during the famine of 1942]. There should be more reporting about the starvation situation in the ’60s,” wrote one.

“This is simply the pot calling the kettle black. Can you tell me where you could flee to on the mainland in 1960s?” asked another.

All this complicates China’s effort to turn the history of Japan’s historical misdeeds into leverage in the dispute over those uninhabited islets in the East China Sea, the ones known to China as the Diaoyu and to Japan as the Senkakus.

The conclusion last month of China’s once-a-decade leadership transition, and the end this coming weekend of Japan’s general election campaign, may offer a respite as contenders for power on both sides feel less pressure to prove themselves hawkish. Japan’s December 16th election now looks likely to restore an opposition candidate and former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, which would at least create an opportunity to realign relations on a smoother path.

Since September, when raucous and sometimes ugly anti-Japan demonstrations took place in Beijing and other Chinese cities, hardline figures on both sides have continued to exchange volleys of fiery rhetoric. Amid the acrimony, the Japanese carmaking and tourist industries have seen declining revenues from China. A report last week in Japan’s Asahi Shimbum said that Toyota has already decided to postpone construction of one new car plant in China, and is considering delaying another.

One good metric on the Chinese side will be the amount of fervid anti-Japanese content that appears in state-run news and entertainment outlets on this year’s anniversary. Like the crowds at Nanjing’s memorial hall, the volume of such content ebbs and flows, according to tide tables set by the commissars who control Chinese media. It is a longstanding pattern, and the amount of official attention paid to the Nanjing massacre has served as a particularly good indicator.

“The government has used the Nanjing massacre for years as a tool,” says Xu Xin, a professor at Nanjing University. “It is like a thermometer telling the temperature of relations between China and Japan. Whenever there is a dispute, there are more news reports and television programmes showing how bad the Japanese were,” he said.

In the run-up to December 13th this year, Chinese media have kept the anti-Japan drumbeat to a minimum. A new three-volume history of the massacre is being published to mark the anniversary (with English and Japanese translations due out later), but state-run news outlets are not paying nearly as much attention to this anniversary as they did to the September anniversary of Japan’s 1931 incursion into northern China. To judge from the light security presence outside Japan’s embassy in Beijing, police are not expecting any repeat of September’s excitement.

Indeed, quiet commemorations of such anniversaries have been the rule, and protests have been the exception. For decades after the war, Chinese accounts rarely singled out the events in Nanjing from the vast, ugly blur of wartime history. Only in the early 1980s did this change. Some historians, such as Yinan He, who is based in America, argue that China pragmatically downplayed its wartime history in the years leading to the 1970s normalisation of relations with Japan; and that the shift in tone of the 1980s served to foster nationalism and unity in unsettled times.

Another professor at Nanjing University, the historian Zhang Sheng, disagrees, attributing the change of tone to the emergence of massacre deniers in Japan, and their efforts to downplay Japanese misconduct in school textbooks.

“Japanese denial spurred Chinese people—and scholars around the world—to research the issue,” he said.

Other issues await similar treatment.

(Picture credit: AFP)