China will soon rein in anti-Japanese demonstrations as it is more concerned about not damaging trade and jeopardizing domestic stability, analysts said on Monday.
The past three weekends of protests have not pressured Japan into softening its position, but they have likely served their purpose for Beijing by drawing global attention to Japan's wartime history.
"In the next two days, they will start to put out more restrictions," said Chan Chepo, Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong's Lingnan University.
"On the political side, relations will be cold for a while, but the Chinese side doesn't want to harm economic and trade relations," Chan said.
There might be sporadic, small-scale protests in coming days, but "the fever" should be over, said Joseph Cheng (
"Chinese leaders always want to ensure they have complete control over foreign policy. They don't want China's policies to be affected by people's sentiments," he said.
"They also understand that these protests must be controlled, otherwise after protesting against Japan this weekend, they may protest against the central government the next weekend," he said.
Still, it is challenging for the government to roll back widespread, nationwide demonstrations after condoning them, if not officially approving them, analysts said.
The times, locations and routes of the protests were widely spread on the Internet prior to the rallies.
But on Monday, Internet chatrooms and instant messaging forums carried no announcements of further protests.
In another sign the government's clampdown has begun, the Communist Party's mouthpiece People's Daily on Monday said while demonstrators were correct in expressing anti-Japanese feelings over alleged distortions in Japanese history textbooks, "extreme actions" were counter-productive.
"To adopt certain extreme actions that violate the law does not help solve the issue," the paper said in an editorial.
"In the course of deepening economic globalization, the overall trend is for increasingly closer Sino-Japanese ties," it said.
Meanwhile, some universities banned students from participating in demonstrations. Police have also been discouraging protesters.
"A friend of mine was contacted by the police. They explained that ongoing protests would be bad for our city," said Wu Qiaofei, a protester in Guangzhou.
"They felt it would be easy to create chaos, easy to lose control," Wu said.
In a country that is tightly controlled and where people still remember the government's violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, even eager patriots such as Wu would not challenge the government's limits.
"I'm not going to join the protests this weekend. Not everyone has to go out on the streets," said Wu last week, referring to a Saturday protest which fizzled, amid a tight police presence.
Analysts said China allowed the recent protests to pressure Japan on a host of disputes and although they were unable to exact any concrete compromises from Japan, Beijing would be delighted by the international media coverage.
"Many people in other countries don't know Japan's role during World War II, including the Nanjing Massacre, comfort women, etc. Now they know, so it has a great publicity result for China," Chan said.
Gilles Guiheux, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China, said Beijing's efforts to persuade the EU to lift its arms embargo against China may suffer.
"Definitely, I would assume the protests would [have an impact,]" Guiheux said. "People think one day it's Japan, the next day, it could be the United States."
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