For most of the tens of thousands of anti-Japanese demonstrators who took to the streets of Shanghai on Saturday, it was the first public protest they had ever seen, let alone taken part in. A few over the age of 35 remembered the pro-democracy campaign of 1989. A handful had joined small anti-American rallies in 1999. But for almost an entire generation this was their first chance to march for a cause.
The result was a strongly worded Japanese protest to China, after the rampage saw the Japanese consulate attacked, restaurants shattered and at least two people severely beaten. ”I saw hundreds of people kicking and beating the two men. Police tried to intervene, but they couldn’t get through the crowd,” said a businessman in his thirties who only gave his surname, Wang. ”Everyone said they had been killed.”
The demonstrations had started small, scattered and peaceful. At 9am there were a few hundred students near the Bund, Shanghai’s river-front, several thousand more in People’s Square and hundreds more here and there throughout the downtown area.
Some were singing the national anthem, others chanted anti-Japanese insults and vowed to defend China with their lives. A few wore T-shirts emblazoned with the blood-splattered face of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Many handed out leaflets with a list of Japanese products to be boycotted. Banners called on Tokyo to face up to its wartime atrocities and give up islands that the two countries are both claiming. One slogan, however, was to prove particularly prescient: ”When the Chinese people get angry, the result is always big trouble.”
By noon there were at least three groups — the smallest of 5 000, the largest in the tens of thousands. With people coming and going throughout the day, it was one of the biggest displays of people power that China has seen since the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
It was also one of the most violent. On Hushanguan road, a mob threw a bicycle through the windows of a Japanese okonomiyaki restaurant. In a nearby shopping district, protesters broke windows at about 10 Japanese-style noodle shops and bars — many of them Chinese-owned. Several Japanese-made cars were pelted with bottles and gravel, regardless of the nationality of the drivers.
When the largest group reached the Japanese consulate, they jostled with riot police who allowed them to throw bottles and stones at the building. The walls were splattered with black and red paint and solar panels on the roof were smashed. ”Japanese pigs get out!” they shouted in a stand-off that lasted hours. Among the participants was a group of three 11-year-old girls, carrying a banner reading: ”Boycott Japanese products.”
Elsewhere, China was on the march. In Hangzhou and Tianjin, crowds — some in the hundreds, some in the thousands — staged anti-Japanese rallies. In Nanjing, a group of more than 300 students resisted police attempts to break up their rally for more than two hours, before the organisers were arrested. More demonstrations are reportedly being planned today in Shenyang, Jinan, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Shijiazhuang, Changsha, Baoding … the list goes on.
This is the third weekend of anti-Japanese protests and they have grown bigger each time. The immediate effect has been to plunge bilateral relations to their lowest point in 33 years. In the longer term, they may yet pose a threat to a communist government that has released a wave of nationalism that could prove difficult to reverse.
Japan’s Foreign Minister, Nobutaka Machimura, flies to Beijing on Sunday on what was supposed to be a hastily arranged fence-mending mission, but in several cities the Chinese authorities have prepared for his visit by bringing people onto the streets.
Although the government insists the rallies are spontaneous, it could control them if it wanted. That much was apparent on Saturday in Beijing, where students were reportedly confined to their dormitories and hundreds of police were checking the identities of people who attempted to enter Tiananmen Square. In Guangzhou, the authorities broke up a planned rally at a football stadium.
But in Shanghai the police not only approved Saturday’s demonstration, they actively encouraged it. At 4.30pm last Thursday, mobile phones in Shanghai buzzed with a text-message from the municipal security office calling on local people to show their love for their country in a law-abiding way. Many among the millions who received the message took it as a green light to join the demonstration. News about the rally was also broadcast by the Shanghai radio station, which informed people about the march while also announcing that it was unauthorised.
During the past week the governments of both countries have stoked passions further. The Japanese Economics Minister labelled China ”a scary country”. On Wednesday, Tokyo deliberately provoked Beijing by announcing the start of oil and gas exploration in waters claimed by China. The same day Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao announced that his country would oppose Japan’s bid to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
The spark for the latest row was Tokyo’s approval of a new history textbook that whitewashes Japan’s wartime atrocities, including the massacre of tens — possibly hundreds — of thousands of civilians in Nanjing in 1937; the forced recruitment of ”comfort women” who were made to work as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels; and the infamous Unit 731’s deadly tests of biological weapons on entire Chinese villages. The offending books, which are published by a right-wing nationalist group, are used in fewer than 1% of Japan’s schools because the vast majority of teachers agree that they distort history. But their very existence is seen by the country’s neighbours as proof that Japan’s leaders refuse to face up to the past.
Such claims are nothing new, but the latest dispute is about far more than history. It is the result of a tectonic shift in East Asia as China grows more powerful and Japan moves closer to the United States to protect its interests. Long-term trends, including a rise of nationalism and an increase of militarism throughout the region, are pushing the two East Asian giants further apart and raising the risk of conflict.
For the first two decades after the two countries restored diplomatic relations in 1972, Japan treated China as a pitiful backward nation in need of charity. But in the past few years this friendly-but-patronising view has been replaced by one of suspicion and fear. In the 1990s China’s economy surged forward by more 9% per year, while Japan’s crawled along at a rate of 1%. Although Japan is still far richer than its giant neighbour, the gap is closing. The two are now locked in competition for regional influence and resources. Beijing is racing Tokyo to sign free trade pacts with other Asian nations. As the world’s second- and third-biggest oil consumers, they are also rivals for energy, which has led to tetchy rows over a Siberian oil pipeline and gas fields in the South China Sea.
Chinese anger is not limited to a specific issue or location. In August 2003, demonstrators in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang took to the streets after the agonising death of a construction worker who uncovered a Japanese chemical bomb left over from the Second World War. The same month a million people signed an internet petition against a Japanese bid to build the lucrative Shanghai-to-Beijing high-speed rail link. Fury erupted again in September 2003 when the media reported that 400 Japanese tourists had hired 500 Chinese prostitutes for a two-day orgy in the south-eastern resort of Zhuhai.
Hopes that the rapid spread of the internet in China would lead to an increase of open democratic debate also appear to have proved wide of the mark. While many sites promoting human rights and religious beliefs are blocked, a plethora of anti-Japanese sites have been largely free to promote hatred.
Last year Japan’s trade with China rose by 27% to £89-billion — a boom that has been credited with lifting Japan out of recession. But a growing number of young Chinese consumers are now refusing to buy ”enemy” products. This has prompted the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, which accounts for about 10% of retail sales, to advise its members to remove Japanese-made goods from store shelves. Nongunshan Jituan, a chain of 1 200 supermarkets, has declared that it will stop selling products made by companies deemed to be sympathetic to the new textbooks.
Such problems might be quickly resolved if the leaders of the two nations had the sort of relationship in which they could privately exchange views. But the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, and the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, are barely on speaking terms.
China has refused Japanese requests for a bilateral summit since 1999. Beijing is particularly enraged by Koizumi’s insistence on making an annual visit to the Yasukuni war shrine, which honours — among millions of others — terrible war criminals. According to the Japanese media, the two leaders are not even in telephone contact. What meetings do take place are snatched — and often bad-natured — talks on the sidelines of multilateral summits, the last of which was more than five months ago.
Japan’s efforts to make amends for the past have been at best hamfisted, at worst insincere. When the two nations restored diplomatic relations in the early 1970s, Japan dodged the issue of wartime responsibility with a statement of regret and a promise to provide huge sums of economic aid. China agreed to waive all claims for compensation – instead of haggling over its population’s right for recompense, Beijing settled for new bridges, dams and airports.
At the time this must have seemed a brilliant face-saving compromise for Tokyo, but it has proved a public relations disaster. Despite numerous apologies by its leaders, Japan is still seen as the country that cannot say sorry. And because billions of dollars of compensation went quietly to Beijing in the form of cheap loans and aid grants, few Chinese people are aware of the contribution made by Japan to their country’s economic development. Instead they read newspaper headlines about elderly comfort women and the relatives of germ warfare victims being denied justice in Tokyo’s courts.
The development aid that served as a substitute for compensation is now drying up. After a decade in which Japan’s economy shrank while China’s surged forward, politicians in Tokyo are refusing to pay for their neighbour’s friendship. Last year Japan announced a 20% cut in cheap loans it provides to China — the third straight annual reduction. Koizumi has said such aid will soon end.
A shift in ideology in China is making matters worse. Communist cadres openly acknowledge that nationalism is replacing Marxism as the raison d’être of the ruling party. ”Nobody understands Marxism. It is ridiculous,” says Li Rui, a former secretary of Mao Zedong. ”The ideals of the past don’t exist any more. So it is right to turn to nationalism. It is the means by which the party can maintain its system and ideology.”
There is certainly a deep well of public hostility towards Japan that the government can tap whenever it wishes to score diplomatic points against its neighbour or distract attention from domestic problems. That much was evident at last weekend’s demonstrations, which were approved and carefully controlled by the authorities. In a tactic that reflected the long-term priorities of the government, riot police steered the protesters away from Tiananmen Square — the main focus of domestic unrest — and towards the Japanese embassy, where they stood by idly as the demonstrators stoned the windows. For the government, incidents of urban students abusing foreigners are far less threatening and more controllable than those of peasants beating up police in impoverished villages, as was the case in Zhajiang province last week.
But China’s leaders are not alone in whipping up nationalist feeling. It is no coincidence that bilateral relations have worsened since Koizumi took power. Under his leadership, Japan has moved to revise its pacifist Constitution and redefine the role of the self-defence forces. Most controversially, it named Taiwan for the first time as a shared strategic concern under its security treaty with the United States. This has led many in Beijing to fear that Japan is being encouraged by the US to abandon its pacifist stance so that it can help contain a resurgent China.
Wenran Jiang, an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, said the recent protests in China and South Korea showed the folly of Japan’s actions: ”It is clearly a wake-up call for Japan’s hardline leadership that its China policy in the past four years has backfired. Koizumi’s wishful thinking that he could prevail and China would have to live with what he does regarding Yasukuni and other things is now replaced by the reality that the damage is severe.”
Tokyo has watched with alarm as China’s military spending has surged forward at double-digit pace for almost two decades. Beijing is equally concerned that it was named for the first time as a potential threat in the latest Japanese defence white paper. The most likely flashpoints are Taiwan or the tiny islands in the East China Sea that the two nations are both claiming in order to expand their territorial waters. War is not on the horizon, but smaller-scale clashes are a distinct possibility. One could have occurred last November, when Japan mounted only its second maritime policing operation since the Second World War in response to the intrusion of a Chinese Han-class nuclear submarine in waters close to the disputed islands. No shots were fired but with Beijing’s fleet growing bigger and bolder as the country becomes richer and more defiantly anti-Japanese, the same might not be true next time.
With the exception of trade, almost all the trends in the bilateral relationship are pointing in a worrying direction. Tokyo has failed to overcome its past, yet it is rushing to embrace an American — rather than Asian — future.
Beijing is cursed with a backward political system, yet instead of reform it has spawned a virulent nationalism as a substitute for ideology. And all the time, the power balance is shifting as China rises and Japan declines.
”Unlike past rows, this is not just a passing phenomenon. There has always been a rabid anti-Japanese minority in China, but such views have now spread to moderates and people who would usually consider themselves non-political. It is hot now to be anti-Japanese,” says Linda Jakobson, senior researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. ”In the long run, Japan-China relations will be a major source of worry for East Asia.”
Many of the protesters agreed that their activism was no passing fad. ”I’ve sold my Japanese car and I’m going to replace my Sony laptop with an IBM,” said He Pei, an American-educated Shanghai woman in her thirties. ”I’ve even stopped using Japanese cosmetic products for three months, which was really hard because they are the best.”
Asked why the demonstrations were taking place now rather than in the past, she paused for a moment. ”Maybe this is happening because China is becoming more powerful.”
China
Population: 1,3-billion
Life expectancy: Men — 69 years; women — 73 years (UN figures)
GDP: $1,843 billion
Army: 2,5-million soldiers
HIV/Aids/HIV: 920 000 infected
Internet: 94-million users in 2004
Mobile phones: 269-million
Japan
Population: 128-million
Life expectancy: Men — 78 years; women — 85 years (UN figures)
GDP: $4 799-billion
Army: 239 900 total forces
Aids/HIV: 6 528 infected
Internet users: 83-users million in 2004
Mobile phones: 87-million – Guardian Unlimited Â