Japan-China tensions

The Washington Post covers the latest tensions from a superficial angle.

Protests have erupted in a dozen cities over the past two weeks, damaging Japanese diplomatic buildings and private businesses. Such public displays of political sentiment are typically tightly policed in this authoritarian country and require official approval and perhaps organizational help. But judging by comments from a variety of Chinese, the mostly college-age marchers represented widespread resentment against Japan more than half a century after the end of World War II.

"The Japanese people committed such a horrible crime against the Chinese people," said a retired Beijing schoolteacher named Zhang, who traveled to visit the memorial, 575 miles southeast of the capital, as part of a trip organized by her teachers association.

..."I hate the Japanese, hate, anger," said Xin Hongwei, 38, who traveled here from rural Henan province with Liu and spent more than an hour passing through the memorial's sober below-ground viewing rooms. "I am very angry over their wrongdoings."

..."Japan killed more than 300,000 Chinese here," Dang Chaoxian, 75, a visitor to the Nanjing memorial, said Tuesday. "We don't want to kill that many Japanese. We just want them to recognize their faults." Dang said he fought in the war between Communists and Nationalists that intensified after World War II and ended in 1949 with the victory of Mao Zedong and the establishment of the Communist government. He said the memory is still vivid.

"I was a soldier during the war of liberation," he recalled. "I know what war is. We don't want war. But Japan should offer a sincere apology to the Chinese people."

So Chinese in their 30s are more angry about Japan than those who actually experienced the occupation? What is going on here? Fortunately The Wall Street Journal actually gets the story behind the story.

Recent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China have reopened old wounds from their shared past, but the standoff is really about the future of the world's most dynamic economic area as it works through a long-term shift in the regional balance of power.

...Beneath the recent quarrels lies a thinly veiled competition for regional dominance. With a gross domestic product nearly half the size of the U.S.'s, Japan is still the world's second-largest economy. Over the past decade or so, it has modernized its military and sent troops overseas for the first time since World War II. Recently, parliamentarians have been preparing a revision of the pacifist clauses in Japan's constitution to allow it to play a greater part in regional security operations.

...The Chinese Communist Party uses its control over education and the media to push a version of history in which it led the Chinese people to victory over the Japanese military, which occupied much of China from 1931 to 1945. The lesson: Only a strong China under Communist
leadership can keep predatory foreign powers at bay.

This isn't about history textbooks or Japan's actions in World War II. It's about a battle for regional dominance, and China's attempts to counter Japan's growing assertiveness. Like Fred Hiatt, I'll start believing that this is really about Japanese atrocities in World War II when China starts apologizing to its own people for the millions that have perished at the hands of their own government.

Update: Michael Ledeen gets it:

Now come the monster anti-Japan riots, ostensibly in response to Japanese behavior during the Second World War, and Japanese failure to publish textbooks that recount the rape of Nanking and other horrors during the Japanese occupation. No one can seriously believe that the oligarchs in Beijing were responding to popular demand; as the great Chinese émigré dissident He Qinglian reminds us, "the Chinese Government has virtually eliminated its citizens' right to publicly assemble, protest, or express any kind of political aspirations." So one must ask why the regime is encouraging these mass protests. Surely not, as some commentators think, because China is enraged at the very thought of a Japanese permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council (U.N. reform is not just around the corner). The answer is almost certainly domestic. The oligarchs know that the Chinese people are angry, and they are providing them with an outlet that serves the regime's purposes, as they have done several times in the recent past: May, 1999, after the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, April, 2001, after the collision with a U.S. reconnaissance plane with a Chinese fighter, and March, 2003, against the liberation of Iraq.