Chinese scholars wage ‘textbooks battle’ with Japan over Diaoyus facts
Call by mainland academics comes after push in Japan for textbooks to show Tokyo owns islands
Mainland academics say China discovered the disputed Diaoyu Islands and suggest this should be taught in schools, days after Tokyo promised to teach in its education textbooks that the chain is part of Japan.
Chinese scholars said literary evidence from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) showed Chinese officials took a trip to the Diaoyus in 1808 - 76 years earlier than when Japan claimed it discovered the East China Sea chain, Xinhua reported.
During the reign of Jiaqing, the seventh emperor of the Qing dynasty, a writer named Qian Yong wrote about a trip that painter Shen Fu and officials made to the islands that year, the academics said.
They both think they are trying to teach the correct information
"Qian Yong's writing proves to the world that, at least in 1808, the Diaoyu Islands were located in China's territorial sea, about a day's sea voyage to the then-Japanese boundary," Fu Xuancong, director of Tsinghua University's classic literature research centre, told Xinhua.
Japan announced on Friday that all elementary school textbooks would call the Senkakus, the Japanese name for the islands, part of Japanese territory.
The same applies to the Takeshima islands, which are claimed by South Korea and called the Dokdos by Seoul.
Peng Ling, a historic book specialist at the China Association of Collectors, said: "The Japanese government ignores facts. And even tends to impose false facts on their future generations."