We’ve Created A Monster…

Adamu and Saru mentioned China in the comments section of my previous post: “If the Chinese government is so intent on stirring up anti-Japanese sentiment and using it as a lever against Japan, why have they suppressed news coverage of this?” That’s a welcome segue into my second and final post on this topic: that China’s anti-Japanese nationalism is a modern invention. Here is it’s history.

For forty years, from the victory of the Communists in 1949 until the Tiananmen riots in 1989, China was remarkably pro-Japanese. The Rising Sun was a symbol of non-Western economic success, a country that had stuck it to the White Man. There capitalism was seen as benign: to paraphrase Mao Zedong, “they’re capitalist, but not really.” Relations were comparatively good through Mao’s reign, according to Wikipedia:

In China, to foster the newly found friendship to Japan [that began in 1972, the year China and Japan normalized their relationship], the Communist Government under Mao Zedong ostensibly suppressed the mention of the Nanking Massacre from public discourse and media, which the Communist Party directly controlled.

… and this continued through the 1980s. There were slight blips with the school textbook issue and the surfacing of the Nanjing Massacre as a political issue. The infamous memorial shown below was built in 1986. But by and large, relations between Japan and China were great, worrying many American strategic planners. For those of you who have read Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, you may remember that his primary concern was that Japan would leave the Western sphere and team up with China. Today, that seems laughable. At the time, it was considered a real threat by some of the world’s best geopolitical thinkers.

Then came Tiananmen Square. Threatened with internal collapse, the government realized that it had to manufacture a stronger sense of national pride to survive. This nationalism was based on covering up the government’s own failures—30 million dead in the Great Leap Forward and the disastorous Cultural Revolution—which was achieved by pointing the finger at outsiders. Said otherwise, “the sense of being humiliated/aggrieved is fundamental to the nationalist identity in China.” (Or at least it was after 1989.) The convenient bugaboo was Japan, and the state began a new campaign in the media and education, taking aim at Japan’s invasion fifty years earlier. The students raised on the anti-Japan bile are now pissed off youngsters, and only now has China’s government realized that it’s created a monster it cannot control.

The manufactured nature of China’s anti-Japanese was driven home to my own trip through China with MutantFrog in 2003. We visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, where there is precious little evidence cited to support the specious claim that 300,000 were killed (widely believed outside of China to be a three-fold exaggeration). The memorial was filled with emotional appeals based on a few buried corpses, pictures of old people sporting nasty scars, alleged testimonies, forged photographs, and totalitarian artwork. This sculture, with a plaster bullet hole carved into the wall, is the main exhibit as you approach the entrance.

But consider the irony when compared with this bullet-riddled wall of a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Xi’an. Here, the bullet holes are real. The statue is new, the original destroyed by China’s own zealous Red Guard in the late 1960s.

Saru’s question is a good one: “If the Chinese government is so intent on stirring up anti-Japanese sentiment and using it as a lever against Japan, why have they suppressed news coverage of this?” Adamu gives a great answer: “Anti-Japanese sentiment only works when it’s internal and not actually directed anywhere real.”

Here’s how I see it: China’s political leaders see what is happening in neighboring South Korea. There, public perception has been distorted to the point where the younger generation has a more positive view of North Korea and China than the US and Japan. While the bureaucracy in the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry are realist and pro-American, the politicians elected by the increasingly irrational public are way out of their league. South Korea has painted itself into a corner and public sentiment will handicap its foreign policy for decades to come.

This is one advantage to China’s authoritarian, nominally communist, government. On the mainland, the realists are not just the bureacracy but the leadership as well because the public can’t choose its leaders… yet. And the current leadership fear a democratic future where rabid public sentiment similar to South Korea will limit manueverability in foreign affairs. China wants to calm the protestors down—they never meant for them to get this excited. And that, my friends, is why they are blocking media coverage and are trying to stop the current protests from spiraling out of control.

NOTE: Ming, who I linked to in the previous post, followed up in his blog by writing “I dont think the article of cominganarchy . com is worth reading.” The inability to accept opposing viewpoints was another hallmark of debate in China that I witnessed in my journey from Shanghai to Urumqi, and another reason China’s leaders fear the future. Many people my age in China expressed bitter hatred for Japan—not historical Japan, but modern Japan—yet were unable to articulate why. “They’re just so… bad.” And rational arguments to the contrary were shrugged off.

SECOND NOTE: Another historical perspective available here via Japundit.