Two weeks before its scheduled Chinese premiere, the Hollywood adaptation of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha has still not been approved for screening by the Chinese government, leading to speculation that officials fear a public backlash from people still upset about second world war military atrocities committed by Japan.

Memoirs stars Chinese actor Zhang Ziyi, now a bona fide Hollywood star thanks to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, as a girl from a poor fishing village who is sold to a geisha house and rises through the ranks to become the most celebrated geisha in Kyoto. The film also features Malaysian actor Michelle Yeoh as her mentor and mainland Chinese superstar Gong Li as a venomous rival.

According to the Associated Press, the film has already attracted angry internet postings denouncing Zhang as a traitor ahead of its release.

Sino-Japanese relations have been traditionally strained - mainly because of Japan's wartime conduct in China. Historians generally estimate the Japanese army killed some 150,000 people during its 1937-38 occupation of the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, then known as Nanking, although Chinese historians put the death toll as high as 300,000. Many Chinese believe Japan hasn't sufficiently atoned for its wrongdoing.

Adding to the already sensitive nature of Memoirs, in the movie Zhang's character serves a businessman who was a Japanese soldier in the occupied Chinese territory of Manchuria.

Anti-Japanese sentiment flared in China as recently as April last year, when locals protested against Japanese textbooks they claim whitewash the country's military atrocities. Demonstrators vandalised Japanese-related shops and smashed windows at Japanese diplomatic offices in Shanghai and Beijing.