Cultural exchange could unite mainland China and Taiwan on Japan war history experience, Hong Kong forum participants say
The mainland and Taiwan coming together to write an official account of the second world war is politically unrealistic, HKU forum hears
It is politically unrealistic for the mainland and Taiwan to jointly write an official history of their resistance against Japanese invasion, three academics said at a forum to mark the 70th anniversary of China's liberation from Japan during the second world war.
The event, titled "Going Back to History", was organised by the Hong Kong China Economic Development Association. Held at the University of Hong Kong on Tuesday, the forum drew an audience of more than 200, which included many secondary school pupils.
The three themes of the event were the history of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, the possibility of cross-strait cooperation in writing the history of Chinese resistance against Japanese invasion, and history education in Taiwan.
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One of the speakers, Professor Wang Hsiao-po, a philosophy teacher at Taiwan's Shih Hsin University, said any joint effort to write an official account of resistance against the Japanese would be fraught with difficulty.
"It's already difficult for the Kuomintang and the Communist Party to agree on who played the leading role in resisting against Japan," he said. "If the Democratic Progressive Party came to power tomorrow, it wouldn't even go to the trouble of arguing with the Communist Party."
