ON a recent visit to my relatives' home, I found myself sitting with them watching a prime-time soap opera about the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945).

The episode showed a handful of Chinese female soldiers sneak into a heavily guarded Japanese garrison, take out the guards using guns with silencers, enter a tent housing the radio, send a message calling for reinforcements, and miraculously escape unscathed.

The characters accomplished all this while the beep of the radio was within the earshot of sentries just meters away.

When we heaped scorn on such theatrical absurdities, my grandmother, now in her late 80s, chimed in. It was both hilarious and certainly not true that Japanese soldiers were the slow-witted dummies depicted on the screen, she said.

In her childhood memories, they were the ruthless devils who often barged into her village, looking for pretty girls to rape.

Thanks to some imaginative directors and script writers, the history of China's eight-year titanic struggle is rewritten: instead of civilian lambs to slaughter and out-gunned ragtag Chinese soldiers, we now see Chinese beating the ruthless invaders hands down. It is as if the turn had come for the "Japanese devils" to suffer the cruelty of war and accept the imagined fact of a much weaker Chinese David vanquishing the mighty Japanese Goliath.

And the cruelty seems endless. Recently we have seen a host of coarsely shot war dramas filled with absurdities.

For instance, in one installment, a heroic kung fu master tears a Japanese soldier into two with his bare hands in a mist of blood and flesh. In another, a female protagonist is gang-raped by Japanese soldiers, then she jumps up (her trousers already fastened) and kills all her assailants, leaving viewers wondering why the superwoman didn't resist her tormentors in the first place.

Physics-defying stunts

In all these dramas, the Chinese warriors, often with little except bows and arrow, more than hold their own against well-trained and better-armed Japanese soldiers. They dodge bullets with the ease of Keanu Reeves in one of the "The Matrix" movies.

To appreciate these physics-defying stunts, we must not bother with technical questions about the characters' uncanny ability to defy gravity or how the explosion of a hand grenade could destroy an aircraft flying at high speed. No wonder that some commentators have noted, tongue in cheek, that confronted with such formidable enemies, it's a miracle that the Japanese had managed to hang on for eight years.

According to a funny tale that went viral online, a Japanese tourist asked his Chinese guide to take him to a battlefield where many Japanese had fought and died. Due to the language barrier, misunderstanding or intentional prank, the tourist was taken to Hengdian, a film studio in Zhejiang Province, where everyday "Japanese" are "slaughtered wholesale" by their Chinese "nemesis."

CCTV released figures last week showing that from January to March, more than 30 series about the war were being filmed or planned. In Hengdian alone, from January 30 to March 2, 10,846 "Japanese troops" were "annihilated."

Ludicrous

Obviously, the absurdity has reached such an extent that authorities decided to put an end to it.

Asked by reporters how he felt about the spate of eye-popping ? and often factually inaccurate ? series, Wang Weiping, an official with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said the broadcasting watchdog has taken note of the issue, and is taking action to correct it.

It's understandable that in peacetime war epics featuring brave Chinese battling marauding Japanese invaders are still one of the most popular themes of TV series. After all, the hideous wartime atrocities committed by Japanese troops still outrage and rankle many Chinese, and the war memories and hatred of the fascists are kept alive as part of our national patriotic education.

So we grow up seeing China's suffering rehashed, again and again in such films as "Nanking! Nanking!" (2009) and "The Flowers of War" (2011) and often the directors go to great lengths to dramatize quixotic individual struggles against the formidable Japanese war machine without compromising historical facts too much.

And what better choices than these orthodox dramas to easily pass censors and garner high audience ratings?

So although Japan occasionally complains that its image is being perpetually cast in a negative light by these war films, the cameras just keep on rolling.

But many directors, in their earnest desire to make knockoffs of classic war epics, are overdoing the theaters to the detriment of historical facts.

While it may give us an adrenalin rush to see brutal Japanese soldiers mauled to pieces, these gory scenes in fact reveal the troubled mind of their authors who have no scruples about distorting the facts of China's subjugation into imaginary victories, to please a deluded audience.

Needless to say, some of the dramas should have been X-rated for containing scenes of graphic violence and sex.

More importantly, the excessive number of these series and their fantastic content is misleading our children about the true story of World War II, leading them to believe that Japan was not China's equal, that China won the war with little more than passion, patriotism and a few martial arts warriors and guerrillas.

History is a serious subject and any tinkering with it must be treated seriously. Although films and soaps are needed to fuel our love of the motherland and commemorate the martyrs who died repelling the invaders, shoddily made, surreal and irresponsible films are counterproductive, as they ignore history and facts, insulting the intelligence of martyrs by showing them defeating unbelievably unintelligent enemies. Thus, they take the glory out of our hard-won victory.

Demystification

We used to have quite a few quality series that demystified our war heroes, presenting them as mortals with shortcomings, rather than saints that never err.

That's why Chinese TV viewers adore Li Yunlong, the cranky, foul-mouthed, boozy, disobedient, George Barton-like protagonist in the wildly popular soap "Liang Jian", or "unsheathing of the sword." This fabled commander of an Eighth Route Army detachment is nothing like the cardboard heroes in other films and newsreels, and is probably far closer to historical reality.

What we have today, instead, are a spate of works that only reveal the vulgar taste of our theatrical obsession. As a result, a rare war-weariness has crept into the public discourse. Is that what the war soap producers wanted?

It's in the public's best interest to put an end to the antics and distortions on TV, for the sake of both our children's innocence, and of the feelings of an audience who respects unadorned history as it is.