China exhibition to mark war against Japan opens in Beijing

Their brand-name sneakers, Japanese cameras and US sportswear stood in sharp contrast to the worn army boots, rusting rifles and khaki tunics on display as hundreds of Chinese visitors gathered to witness the Great Victory and Historical Contribution exhibition in suburban Beijing.

The exhibition is running at the unambiguously named Museum of the War of the Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

While the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 saw the beginning of the conflict, the clash at the Marco Polo bridge in 1937 indicated a further escalation in violence and the large-scale invasion of China, which led to a brutal occupation that lasted until Japan's defeat in 1945.

As animosity lingers over the war lingers, the exhibition is a testament to the difficult relations between the two Asian giants, which continue to this day.

“We must cherish peace while being cautious of the future,” said Chinese president Xi Jinping as he visited the exhibition. He was accompanied by the other six members of the politburo’s standing committee, China’s elite ruling body, a clear sign of the importance being attached to acknowledging China’s role in the second World War.

The key message of the exhibition is warning against what China sees as Japan’s revived militarism, even as Beijing becomes more aggressive in pushing its own territorial claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Some overseas observers, and conservative Japanese politicians, feel that China is using the anniversary as propaganda to boost domestic political interests.

Soldiers and naval personnel in full uniform stand by to assist visitors. One room has a glass floor beneath which sits all manner of gun, grenade and other military paraphernalia, while another room has a spectacular diorama of a battle scene. In all, there are 1,170 pictures and 2,834 artefacts on display.

Many of the artefacts are shocking, such as the skull of a person killed in the 1937 Nanjing massacre and a spiked metal torture cage.

There are poison gas shells and gas masks believed to have been used by Japanese troops, and graphic images of massacres, including heads mounted on wooden stakes. A photograph shows a woman raped by Japanese soldiers, disembowelled and left by the roadside.

Relations between the two neighbours have long been affected by what the Chinese see as Japan’s failure to sufficiently atone for the suffering it caused during the war and, as proof of Japan’s failure to apologise properly, Beijing points to the regular visits by Japanese leaders to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including war criminals.

There is also a desire for Tokyo to acknowledge the disputed ownership of the Senkaku/ Diaoyu islands, an uninhabited archipelago in the East China Sea, formally owned by Japan but now claimed by China.

Between 13 and 20 million Chinese people died in the conflict, known variously in China as the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) and the Anti-Fascist war, and 100 million were forced to become refugees. The country was the biggest casualty of Japan’s expansionist policy of the 1930s, when it sought to establish the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”.

The exhibition also gives a prominent role to the Communist Party in fighting the Japanese, even though it was the Nationalists who ran China at the time and the Japanese surrendered to their leader, “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek, days after the US-led Allies accepted the surrender of Japan in the Pacific.

The communists later defeated the nationalists in a civil war. The nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949. Chairman Mao Zedong, modern China's architect, was largely uninterested in forcing Japan to apologise. Without the invasion and Japanese militarism, there would have been no Communist revolution, he argued, when Japanese envoys came to China in 1972 to apologise. With the nationalists tied up fighting the Japanese, it was easier for the communists to create the conditions for the revolution.

An editorial in the Global Times newspaper criticised western media, singling out Reuters news agency, for describing the events as "propaganda to strengthen Chinese nationalism".

"Some people say such high-profile commemorations are politically motivated to address domestic conflicts and international problems like the South China Sea disputes. That's nonsense," said Hu Lingyuan, a professor of Japanese studies at Fudan University. It was legitimate, he said, to commemorate history and those who sacrificed and contributed to the war victory.

Meanwhile, also in the Global Times, Lu Yaodong, director of the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said every country had the right to remind people of what happened during the war.

“By displaying national documents and photos on the war, the exhibit will provide an objective to take on the suffering of ‘comfort women’ and other crimes committed by Japanese invaders during the war,” he said. “It’s not aimed at fanning hatred between countries but to remind the world not to repeat the same mistake.”

In September, China will hold a military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in Asia. So far, only Russia has confirmed it will send officials and soldiers to take part in the parade, as other foreign governments are anxious about giving the wrong signal to other countries in the region.