But last week saw the 70th anniversary of an extra-ugly episode, one of the worst of the 20th century. Starting on December 13, 1937, invading Japanese troops occupied Nanking, then China’s capital, and ran amuck, brutally and senselessly killing an estimated 300,000 people.

Anyone with the emotional strength to want more precise information should read The Rape of Nanking, a powerful account by Iris Chang published in 1998. There’s also a reality-based 2004 novel, The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder.

In Beijing, the present capital, China’s leaders routinely condemn Japan’s wartime record and object to Japanese histories that downplay or deny what happened.

The value of recalling horrific history as it really happened lies in learning so that similar circumstances and tragedies can be avoided.

Yet since 1949, the greatest atrocities against Chinese people, like the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Beijing Massacre (1989), were inflicted by their own government. And China has become a world leader at media control and at rewriting its own history for political reasons.

Have China’s Communist leaders learned from the atrocities committed by the Japanese army seven decades ago? Or have they learned all the wrong lessons?

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