Can crackdown on anti-Japan "hate education" stop senseless killings? - Week in Review #28
This week ends with 2 deadly events in China. In one case, a 10-year-old Japanese student studying in Shenzhen was stabbed. Unlike the similar June attack in Suzhou, nobody was able to save the child this time. He soon passed away tragically, causing nationwide debate about what to do with our anti-Japanese culture.
In another violent incident, Liu Wenjie, head of the finance department of Hunan Province, fell to her death from her apartment, along with 2 other men, presumably her murderers. This was an extremely unusual case of how a high-ranking government official died in China.
When I look at these two events, I do not look at them separately, but as parts of the broader surge in violent crimes that I vaguely sensed. I began to sense it a few weeks ago with a number of other violent crimes, but I was not sure whether my sensing was correct because data were so lacking in this area. I am still not sure this time. But I think it’s about time that I should note it down so we can get the conversation going.
The killing of the Japanese schoolboy in Shenzhen
The date of the attack was 9/18, a date any child in China is taught to remember. On this same day in 1931, Imperial Japanese’s Kwantung Army launched the invasion of Manchuria, the vast territory of today’s Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces, and a great part of Inner Mongolia combined. The invasion was swift and easy, facing minimal resistance from the Chinese forces. The date was labeled to be China’s “Day of Humiliation”. Some even say 1931 represents the start of WWII (although I personally believe the Second Sino-Japanese War which started in 1937 should be seen as the starting point.)
The identity of the suspect was never publicized by the authorities, but his motives can’t be more obvious. Without anyone explaining, every Chinese knows what is going on here. It’s the equivalent of killing a random Arab child on 9/11. People instantly get the message you are sending.
I grieved for the kid’s parents. In the scant details that we can get from news reports, we know that when the kid was attacked, his mother was also with him. She held the kid in her arms, her hands soaked in his blood, crying and asking why this had happened to her child.
The case itself is plain and simple. This is the killing of a young child, no matter what the child’s nationality is. This is a cowardly, despicable act that must be condemned and must be mercilessly prosecuted.
I genuinely hope this case can be as simple as that.
The thorny problem for Chinese authorities, as well as for Chinese people, is how to respond to the “Japan” factor in this. In one of the news clips, a local Shenzhen resident on his way to lay down flowers for the child, said to the camera that this killing was a direct result of years of “hate education仇恨教育”. Such sentiment is echoed universally by many people of the “minority liberalist” camp in my “duo-China model”. Many people are calling for the authorities to clamp down on hate speech and hate education steadfastly. Even without government intervention, internet platforms, just like what they did back in June, have already taken matters into their hands and launched a further crackdown on hate speech.
Can these proposed ideas work? Is this attack just a result of “hate education”?
I genuinely hope it is as simple as that. But it runs much deeper than that.
Let me state this piece of context first: the history of Sino-Japan relations, and specifically the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945, a.k.a Second Sino-Japanese War) is at the heart of modern China’s own identity.
The modern idea of being “Chinese”, our national identity, and our nationalism were formed during the so-called “Century of Humiliation.” Before that point, we were only lowly subjects of some emperors and their mandarins, be it the Qing, Ming, or Tang. But the Century changed everything and infused the idea into our minds of a modern nation-state, with citizens with equal rights forming a republic.
Although the Century was started by the British, and although after the Century, it was the Russians who took the most lands from China, all of the lowest psychological points of that century were marked by conflicts with Japan. This included the first Sino-Japanese War (1895) that eliminated the Qing Dynasty’s vital naval forces and lost Taiwan to Japan, even prompting the Qing court to trial with constitutional monarchy (unsuccessfully) for a few days. The above-mentioned Mukden Incident (1931) gave away China’s richest land to Japan, giving historical significance to “9/18”. All of these episodes prompted all Chinese people, not just intelligentsia and high officials, but commoners as well, to realize that we are one nation, and that only as one nation, those of us who were left to live can no longer be humiliated.
This realization built up to a crescendo at the absolute nadir of the Century, which also became the most pivotable chapter of modern China’s nation-building process: the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.
The War of Resistance, a theater of WWII, was like no other war, simply because of the amount of atrocities committed. Unlike Nazis in Germany, who also killed but was more focused on killing with maximum efficiency and discipline, the Imperial Japanese troops killed for display and joy. One of the most egregious examples is soldiers competing against each other at the speed of chopping off civilian heads. It was no wonder why it’s called the Rape of Nanking, not simply the Massacre of Nanking. There was a strong, psychopathic element involved here, that was quite hard to erase from traumatized memories of the victims and their descendants.
I always have the feeling that, possibly due to extreme living conditions on the barren Japanese islands in the pre-modern times, Japanese people developed an attitude towards life and death different from other peoples. American soldiers in WWII must have understood what I meant during all those “banzai” and kamikaze attacks.
This different attitude towards life and death runs deep. In an almost forgotten corner of Japan, there was a monument called Mimizuka in Kyoto, Japan. The monument looked serene and beautiful, but you won’t feel beautiful about it if you know that underneath the monument were buried the severed noses of 38,000 Koreans and 30,000 Chinese during the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 16th Century.
Call me ignorant, but I have never heard of any other similar sites on earth. Japan is truly unique here.
Should all of these episodes be forgotten, and so that we won’t have “hate education”? Where do we draw the line?
The line may be drawn between past and present, and all of these grotesque atrocities could have just been left there in history books, and people living in the present now can move on.
But when it comes to Japan though, this matter is further complicated by the fact that Japan, unlike post-war Germany, has never really repented for the crimes.
Apart from very few high-ranking officials who were tried and executed (and later enshrined in Yasukuni), the top person who should bear responsibility for the war, the Emperor, was never touched.
And you shall look no further than Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of now-deceased Shinzo Abe. Kish was in charge of economic affairs for Manchukuo, the puppet state in Manchuria that Japan installed after “9/18”. He later joined Prime Minister Tojo’s cabinet, voted yes for Pearl Harbor, and co-signed the declaration of war against the US. After the war, and after a brief stint in jail, he returned to political life and became none other than the Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. This is equivalent to having a key member of Hitler’s entourage later become Chancellor of Germany.
With so many remnants of Imperial Japan firmly in power in post-war Japan, it’s no wonder why Japan has gone on a different path from Germany in terms of its treatment of history. Japan never had her own version of Willy Brandt, who famously knelt to repent for the Polish on behalf of Germany.
The usual pattern is something like this: in April 2015, Shinzo Abe expressed remorse for Japan’s war deeds at a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where he also met Xi. However, a day after their meeting, three of Mr. Abe’s cabinet ministers visited the contentious Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.
The closest thing I can find in terms of an apology was the joint communique between China and Japan when the two relaunched diplomatic relations in 1972. In it, it was read that:
“The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply reproaches itself.”
“Keenly conscious”, they were.
What can authorities do?
When we put our reason for existence, all the historical atrocities, and all the perceived non-repentance together, it is only natural for you to have a very, very strong anti-Japan sentiment that has always been brewing in Chinese society. And you don’t actually need the state and party propaganda machinery to consciously push for it. All you need is for the state to sit on the sidelines and do nothing about it, and such sentiment will naturally grow and become self-reinforcing.
By this point, I have to put on a full disclaimer here. I am not an apologist for the killer of the Japanese schoolboy. I am no nationalist when it comes to Japan. I recognize that the Japan of today is markedly different from the Japan of yesterday. I also don’t think the sense of guilt should hang on Japan’s future generations forever. My goal here is only to lay down the broader context so that you can gain some appreciation of the challenges that Chinese authorities face.
What can authorities do about this?
Can authorities suddenly declare Japan to be the “good guy”, or issue a ban on anti-Japan content?
Can authorities announce a special protection scheme for Japanese citizens living in China?
Doing so would risk a massive backlash, for all of the above-mentioned reasons. In fact, even the Communist Party of China itself also owes a great part of its own existence to it. A pivot to putting an explicit ban on anti-Japan sentiments would be seen as a betrayal of its own pledge to the people.
Just like the Emperor of Japan was spared a trial in order to save the core foundation of Japanese society, anti-Japanese sentiment will never be touched in order to save the core foundation of modern China.
This is why, in both knifing deaths in Suzhou and in Shenzhen, authorities tried very hard to downplay the “Japan” factor in them. The perpetrators and their motives were never formally identified. The logic is simple: If they were ever announced, it would only inspire more copy-cats to follow suit.
A much wiser way in this scenario is to stay mute on the Japan factor, while exerting control behind the scenes. Letting internet platforms act as “white gloves” in censorship is one way. Low-key snabbing of key trouble-makers is another. Long-time readers of this newsletter must have known the infamous “Ironhead Brother”, who pissed at Yasukuni Shrine back in June. In a tiny news block just a few weeks ago, it was announced that Hangzhou police just arrested him for exhortation-related crimes. But I think you can well understand he is actually a political prisoner.
(And I am not surprised that Western media never unearth such cases as evidence of the Chinese government’s ruthless persecution of dissidents. The truth is, the Leviathan is indifferent to whether you are a “human rights activist” or an ultranationalist demagogue. As long as you are destabilizing the core foundation, you will be taken away.)
Will our “Japan problem” ever be solved? I don’t think so. The best we can do is to hope for our political system to be stable so that the brewing demon of hate among the people can be contained and channeled elsewhere.
Final words
My original focus for this article was not on Japan but on the implications and reasons for a spate of violence, including the Japanese schoolboy case, the death of Liu Wenjie as well as many other unusual instances of violence that have happened recently. I didn’t expect this to expand into a stand-alone mini-treatise on how China’s “Japan hate” has come about. But so be it. I will finish the rest of my original article next week, likely in a paid post.
To end this article, let me quote a heartfelt article by Baiguan’s good old friend, Bob Chen, who also went to lay down his flowers when he happened to be in Shenzhen for business this week. This paragraph from him, speaking also as a parent, points at the key dilemna we are facing today:
我也不知道需要怎样的历史教育。毫无疑问，我们应该把历史讲的清清楚楚明明白白，日军的侵略和丧失人性，当年国民的愚昧动员，都无可质疑。但如何能传递这样的信息，同时又把过往和今天，把系统和个人，把成人和儿童分开？如何能把这样复杂的信息通过短视频传递？或者说，这根本就是反流量的，只有加速撞到南墙，才有可能反弹？
"I also don’t know what kind of historical education is needed. Undoubtedly, we should present history clearly and transparently. The aggression of the Japanese army and the loss of humanity, as well as the ignorance of our people at that time, are beyond doubt. But how can we convey this information while distinguishing between the past and the present, the system and the individual, and adults and children? How can such complex information be communicated through short videos? Or perhaps this is fundamentally against the logic of traffic [in mobile internet]; only after hitting a wall at high speed might there be a chance for us to rebound?"
This post is for free, and the comment section is open to all. My rule is simple: be civil.
Important correction: in the original post I mentioned Helmut Kohl, but in fact it was Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Many thanks for the insightful analysis of the dark and reactionary beginnings of Chinese nationalism. It has made sense of a lot confusing issues for me ... Especially the tenacious hate and resentment of the Japanese among the Chinese. I wonder how much different it would have been if Japan had been forced to confront their atrocities after the war and make reparations.