The school history textbook issue resurfaced in China-Japan relations on April 4 when Tokyo announced that school text books will refer to the Senkaku islands by their Japanese name and students will be taught that the chain is part of Japan's territory.

Meanwhile Xinhua quoted Chinese scholars and officials as claiming that 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. 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." However, Ryoko Nakano, a professor of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore, said China's earliest visit to the Diaoyus did not equal ownership of the islands. According to Nakano, "The Chinese visited those islands, but they didn't claim sovereignty. Only after the 1970s did they start to claim sovereignty, but Japan claimed sovereignty way before that, when it was considered no-man's land, and that's legitimate and legal from a Japanese point of view."