The historical circles in Beijing held a symposium on Wednesday to protest the Japanese Education Ministry's approval on April 5 of textbooks distorting the history. Attending scholars believed that the new version history textbooks glorify Japan's past war as right in defiance of human peace and conscience. It gravely hurts the sentiment of people in all the war-victim countries. It is also a poison for the Japanese youth.

Dozens of historians from Beijing University, Renmin University of China, Capital Normal University, the Party History Research Center, Modern History Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Memorial Hall of Chinese People's Anti-Japanese War made speeches at the meeting.

They believed that history education must explain historical facts scientifically, draw lessons from the history and learn from mistakes.

It was learned that a common textbook of the South Asian history compiled by more than 30 Chinese, Japanese and S.Korean scholars has been completed and will be issued in three languages in May.

Bu Ping, a compiler of the common textbook and research fellow at the Modern History Institute of the CASS, said the compilers hoped to tell students the true history in order to reject the right-wing textbooks.

According to Bu Ping the common textbook would be issued in Japan as a subsidiary textbook. It is equivalent to extracurricular reading material and its approval is not required by the Education Ministry.

The common textbook of the South Asian history uses many pictures and about 150,000 words to accurately record major historical events from 1840 to 1945. History about the period is the emphases of the right wing's vicious distortion, said Bu Ping.

It is impossible for the book to pass the examination of the Education Ministry as a history textbook, said Bu Ping, so it can only serve as a subsidiary textbook.

By People's Daily Online