The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been pushing nationalist rhetoric and xenophobic education, and now this has led to tragedy. On Wednesday last week — the 93rd anniversary of the Mukden Incident, when Japan launched its invasion of Manchuria — a 10-year-old Japanese boy living in Shenzhen was stabbed to death on his way to school. This is the second time this year a Japanese citizen has been attacked in public in China. In addition to the attacks on Japanese residing in China, five US college teachers were injured in a knife attack in June.
These attacks show a surge of violence against foreigners. These are not isolated incidents; they are the result of China’s long-term resentment and xenophobic and vengeful education that has been percolating since the end of the Qing Dynasty and the Boxer Rebellion and its Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.
As a targeted recipient of the CCP’s rhetorical threats and militaristic behavior, Taiwan in particular should pay more attention to the development of Chinese nationalism and its attacks.
This tragedy of the stabbing of a Japanese child reflects a vicious cycle in history. China and Japan are old rivals, both originally sealed off from Western countries, but which would eventually branch off on their own separate paths of national development.
In the mid-1800s, Japan experienced the then-imminent existential threat of US commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships,” casting off militarized rule by the Shogun in favor of the restoration of imperial power with the Meiji Restoration, accepting the fruits of Western civilization, such as science and modern technology, pooling the efforts of all its people into service on behalf of the state.
Through these actions, Japan achieved modernization. It would soon fight and win against the Qing Dynasty in the first Sino-Japanese War, and imperial Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, boosting it to prominence as a world power and gaining a more equal status in the eyes of the colonizing empires of the West.
Taking note from the failed “100 Days of Reform” of the Qing court, Japan began its sharp rise toward militarized nationalism, an inevitable trend in the face of an enfeebled and fading China. A powerful country wanting to realize hegemony would have to go off on vaunted and lofty historic missions, just as Japan tried with its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” rationalizing its need to invade.
To China, its “century of humiliation” is one facet of historical ignominy. Its Pyrrhic victory at the end of the eight-year-long Second Sino-Japanese War was actually carried out and assisted by a US-led alliance. Japan surrendered unconditionally, but it was not because of any attempt by China to strike Japan — it never did — instead it was because of a US counterattack campaign and the dropping of two atomic bombs.
Because of this, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who led China’s resistance against Japan, lacked any prestige to make a clarion call for China, instead holding off a forceful challenge by an ascendant CCP. Ultimately, the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) hold on China disintegrated and it was defeated, fleeing to Taiwan.
Similarly, despite the CCP defeating Chiang, it fielded no large armies or battlefield successes against Japan during the eight years of resistance. Instead, the CCP waited opportunistically while the KMT was being whittled down to grow its own strength — that is what led to the CCP’s seizure of political power. It simply relied on guns and Chiang and the KMT’s internal corruption. There was no just, legitimate government to speak of with the CCP’s takeover of China.
After the CCP established the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong (毛澤東) launched 10 mass public campaigns, including the Cultural Revolution, to protect his grip on political power, severely crippling the country, directly leading to its cultural and economic backwardness.
Following the catastrophic decade of the Cultural Revolution, a politically rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) came to power as the new CCP leader. Deng opened up China to external trade, and introduced capitalist-style economic reforms, bringing 30 to 40 years of double-digit economic growth to the country that would ultimately transform into the world’s second-largest economy.
Still, the CCP — being an authoritarian party-state — did not take any input from the populace over which it governed, and lacks legitimacy. The party adamantly refuses to democratize China, and its dictatorship has only grown more severe with the development of technology. Thus, the party harnessed the hopes of Chinese to make their country powerful and prosperous, once again fanning the flames of nationalism and patriotism, equating the party with the nation itself, and not just consolidating and melding party and state, but placing the party above country.
Furthermore, it has created imagined enemies out of other countries, including the US, Japan and Taiwan. Ever since the end of World War II, not only has Japan not invaded China again, but it has instead given massive amounts of aid to China and invested heavily in its businesses. Apparently, this has not been enough to make up for Japan’s wartime affronts and behavior, yet if the CCP is actually a reasonable, rational political party, it would have tried to move China’s relations with Japan toward friendship, which would help thaw some of the enmity, leading to a peaceful joint prosperity and coexistence.
However, the CCP has shown that it does not want to abandon its insidious inner nature. On the one hand, it wants Japan’s economic aid and investment, but on the other, it stokes anti-Japan sentiment among its populace, seeing its neighbor as an irredeemable enemy that must be vanquished. It is as if only by utterly destroying Japan would China be able to complete its dream of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.”
The Second Sino-Japanese War was more than 80 years ago, and today’s Japan is not a military powerhouse, it is a pacifist democracy. Moreover, Japan works exhaustively in its modern mission to aid other countries, but no matter how much it has turned a new leaf from its past militarism and empire-building, it cannot shake off the CCP’s non-stop demonization.
Under the CCP’s anti-Japan education, Japan is still seen as a heretical, evil land — it has to serve a purpose as a sacrificial lamb for the CCP, no matter how much of an internal contradiction the CCP mires itself in. In fanning the flames, Chinese enmity toward Japan is close to boiling over. Not only are its movies and television programming filled to the brim with dramas centering on resisting a Word War II-era Imperial Japan or fighting off Japanese pirates, even simply wearing a Japanese kimono out and about in China is grounds for castigation and public shaming and hurling abuse and invective, labeling offenders as “betraying the Han race.” Some nationalistic Chinese have even traveled to Japan to deface the Yasukuni War Shrine with graffiti along with other unsavory, immature behavior.
The CCP is promoting a fanatical, rabid atmosphere of anti-Japanese sentiment, which has led to Japanese living in China taking the brunt, culminating in the slaying of an innocent child.
Nationalism is a double-edged sword. When a nation is weak, patriotism could inspire people to sacrifice and make contributions toward their nation, further serving as a driving force for national development.
However, if a nation is already strong, a dictator or authoritarian could stoke nationalism, not only to glorify themselves, but to prepare for the realization of a “historic mission,” a “manifest destiny” that takes it down the road to infringing upon others.
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany is perhaps the most pertinent example to the Western mind. His rise to power was predicated on the impunity and hardship inflicted on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, but after it rebuilt its military strength, Germany decided to attempt its mission of unleashing the Third Reich on the world. Ultimately, nationalism would be Germany’s downfall, taking it from a shaky rise to outright ruin.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) abandoned Deng’s concepts of “hide and bide” and of “not proclaiming yourself a hegemon.” Xi has provoked tensions in the South and East China seas and the Taiwan Strait, and has used his “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” and the “China dream” to stoke Chinese nationalism, creating another modern-day iteration of the Boxer Rebellion, intent on meting out anti-foreign “justice” by first striking out at Japan, attempting to swallow up Taiwan and putting the finishing touches on China’s hegemonic reign.
The killing of a Japanese boy is a symbol of long-term anti-Japanese education coming to fruition. The road to national strengthening and prosperity is one of “looking ahead” and “advancing forward,” yet the bolstering of a communist China, especially Xi’s creation of an autocratic red Chinese empire, is “backward-looking,” dragging the spirit and ideology of Chinese back to a second colonial era of spheres of influence that we should hope no longer exists, attempting to use mob conceptions of justice and righteousness to spread hate and vitriol against the outside world, and seeking a spiritual revenge against Japan for its past militaristic nationalism.
China’s military strength is advancing, but it has no means of taking on the entire democratic world.
Today it views Japan as its enemy, and threatens Taiwan with invasion, just as a means of trying to wash away its self-pitying “century of humiliation.” Sadly, China does not realize that Japan and Taiwan’s fate rests with its close ties to the rest of the family of democracies. Should the CCP one day attempt grander visions of adventurism, and make bigger strides on its road to nationalism and challenge the whole democratic camp, not only would it never wipe away the blemishes from its century of humiliation, the sun would fully set on all its recent economic development and Xi would go down in history books as an even greater pariah.
Translated by Tim Smith
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