Nanjing Letter:Nanjing has the feel of a capital city, its thoroughfares wide and on an imperial scale, and yesterday's 70th anniversary of the "Rape of Nanking", the massacre of hundreds of thousands by Japanese troops who invaded the city in 1937, was marked in a fashion worthy of a capital - car horns blared, there was a period of silence, and a new massacre memorial opened on the city's outskirts.
However, the senior communist leadership stayed away, and there has been little input from Beijing into the 70th anniversary events, a sign of the ambiguous approach by the ruling Communist Party to the city formerly known as Nanking.
China insists that Japanese troops killed 300,000 men, women and children in the weeks that followed Nanjing's capture, with many victims raped and tortured. Some Japanese historians say the number was much lower, with others, who would qualify as Holocaust deniers in Europe and possibly be jailed for their views, deny the massacre even happened. An Allied war tribunal put the Nanjing death toll at about 142,000.
The newly expanded massacre memorial is a remarkable building - sorrowful sculptures dotted around the museum, and a building combining elements of the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial in the German capital. German artists and engineers, as well as experts from France, Britain, the United States and Israel, were consulted on the project, said Zhu Chengshan, the memorial's curator.
Wary of Japanese accusations that the Chinese are too eager to use the event as a propaganda tool, Zhu told of how the museum would use high-tech recreations, thousands of new artifacts, new testimonies and short films to illustrate the event.
"All of the materials show people the objective facts. We want young people to think rationally and we
want to direct visitors to see the historical issues in Sino-Japanese relations," he said.
A big factor why the memorial launch and the 70th anniversary is not getting higher national coverage - and Beijing TV-9 significantly ran a long piece about travelling in Japan at prime time yesterday - is the fact that China's often fractious relations with Japan are in a warm phase at the moment.
Beijing and Tokyo have been working hard to defuse the potential time bomb that their long-running tensions over history and power pose to the region.
Yasuo Fukuda is due in China soon, more than a year after his predecessor as prime minister, Shinzo Abe, broke the ice with a visit.
Japan has been careful not to trumpet visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours war criminals along with the dead of the second World War and which has proven an extremely divisive issue between the two trading partners.
The other reason is that Nanjing is a city not beloved by the communists. For many, Nanjing is the true capital of China, especially those of Kuomintang (KMT) heritage in Taiwan.
Nanjing means "southern capital" (nan means south), just as Beijing means "northern capital (bei means north), and its positioning on the Yangtze river near the coast and its useful location near Shanghai and other economic powerhouses are a strong argument for it being capital rather than the remotely located, desert-bound Beijing.
The first emperor of the Ming dynasty elected Nanjing as capital in 1368, and large chunks of the wall built around the city then still stand, each brick marked with the name of the bricklayer who placed it there, even though it is a booming metropolis today with skyscrapers and pollution, just like any other big city in China.
Nanjing was usurped in the early 1400s, and the Manchus who formed the Qing dynasty which chose Beijing as the capital in the early 1400s, the desert climate suiting their Mongolian constitutions.
The city became infamous after the Opium War because it was here the Treaty of Nanking was signed in 1841, ceding Hong Kong to Britain and establishing treaty towns occupied by foreigners all over the country, including Nanjing itself. The humiliation over the treaty still reverberates in China today.
In 1853 the city became the headquarters of the Taiping Uprising, a band of proto-Christians run by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace fell with huge loss of life after foreign-backed armies took the city in 1864.
In 1911, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown, Sun Yatsen established the Republic of China with Nanjing as the capital. It was also the Nationalist KMT's capital under Chiang Kai-shek. After the war, when the Japanese had surrendered, Nanjing again became capital for four years, before the Revolution in 1949 which saw Beijing restored as capital.
It is this chequered past, and its long association both with rogue elements like the Taiping rebels and the detested KMT, that explains the ambiguous approach to Nanjing.
At times of great strain between the two Asian powers, the Nanjing survivors are given great coverage, their obvious propaganda value not being missed. But when things are going well between Beijing and Tokyo, the men and women who survived the assault are not on the agenda.
I spoke to one old soldier who survived the massacre, and asked him if he would have liked president Hu Jintao or premier Wen Jiabao to come down to attend the events this week. A real diplomat, he said leaders and workers alike were all welcome. But his wife's fierce nods at what she clearly felt was a lack of recognition spoke volumes.
