The main reason for the current round of anti-Japanese sentiment in China is Tokyo's campaign to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a role that would challenge China's supremacy in Asian leadership. It may therefore be argued that what is happening has more to do with the geopolitics of 2005 than about the Nanjing Massacre of 1937.

But the memory of Japanese atrocities has barely faded and does much to explain the mass street protests that are neither sanctioned exactly nor altogether condoned by the authorities. The reasons for this curious state of affairs are not hard to discern because, on the one hand, the demonstrators are expressing patriotic fervor and support for government policy, while on the other they are moving ahead of the government in their vehemence. More importantly the demonstrations are largely spontaneous and therefore beyond the control of the state.

The central government fears spontaneity, particularly in political matters - and rightly so because once people have it in their minds that they can take to the streets without government approval, they may well chose to do so on matters less likely to be seen benignly in Zhongnanhai.

However, the fundamental problem of Sino-Japanese relations remains. While other countries have moved on since the events of World War II, China and Japan have not. There were Japanese atrocities in other countries occupied by the Imperial Army during the war, including Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. But these nations seem to have managed to put the past behind them.

Korea, which endured a far longer period of Japanese occupation and sees continued discrimination against its nationals, finds it harder to forget.

China is hardly in the same situation as Korea but is moving towards a similar level of unease with the Japanese. The question arises as to whether this is because of events of some six decades ago or is it more about the vacuum of ideological purpose in the Chinese nation?

Although China remains nominally a communist country, the ideology of Karl Marx barely flickers into the consciousness of most people. The government pays lip service to its communist roots but is busy dismantling all vestiges of a system based on class struggle and the principles of equality.

Shorn of a meaningful national ideology or set of beliefs, the Chinese Communist Party has sought refuge in patriotism. Patriotism is supposed to exhort the achievements of the nation but is often defined by negatives rather than positives. In many nations patriotism and xenophobia, are close relatives. Indeed patriotism is often reinforced by dislike of neighbors. In China this dislike has reached an acute form in the antagonism towards Japan.

Things have reached a stage where anti-Japanese sentiment is becoming a defining element of Chinese patriotism. In other words the spirit of loving the nation is being defined by the hatred of another nation.

This suggests some considerable deficit in things to love about the nation itself. And here lies the problem but, as ever, the matter is far from simple because the Japanese seem to go out of their way to be unlovable. Revising school text books to erase mention of Japanese atrocities in the war rightly generates fury; so do official visits to war shrines that commemorate the perpetrators of these atrocities

Yet what are we to make of statements by President Hu Jintao who insisted this week that ``only a country that respects history, takes responsibility for history and wins over the trust of peoples in Asia and the world at large can take greater responsibilities in the international community.''

Where does that leave China itself? Here is a country that has great difficulties coming to terms with its own history. In the past few months we have seen the problems it has in remembering Zhao Ziyang, the leader deposed in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Over a longer period we see the way that China deals with the history of its occupation of Tibet. We can see that it remains in denial over the bloody nose inflicted by Vietnam during the border war of 1979 and so on.

If China wants to stand on the high moral ground when dealing with the distortions of history it surely cannot do so on the basis of its record - a record which demonstrates it cannot even come to terms with the enormity of the disasters that characterized the Mao Zedong era. History is a great deal more than a mere recording of dates and the shuffling of events into chronological order.

But in China it has become much less a record of past events and much more a means of propaganda. This in no small way explains why history hangs heavily over China and has provided an obstacle to progress.

The experience of other countries shows that when people learn more of their history they react strongly to deliberate distortions. Both China and Japan might care to think about this.

vines@netvigator.com

Stephen Vines is a journalist and entrepreneur