A woman laying a bouquet of flowers outside Shenzhen Japanese School on Sept 19, following the fatal stabbing of a 10-year-old child in Shenzhen. - Photo: Reuters
BEIJING: On Sept 18, China commemorated the 93rd anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 with a promise to “never forget national humiliation”, a long-running slogan used by state media and the government in publicity materials.
Museums unveiled new artefacts from the “war of resistance against Japanese aggression”, as the 14-year period until the end of World War II is known in China. Students attended assembly talks and wrote reflective essays.
Influencers uploaded tearful videos of themselves visiting historical sites, such as the Datong Mass Grave Memorial in Shanxi province, which commemorates the 60,000 miners tortured or killed at the Datong coal mine during the war.
“This video might make some people uncomfortable, but I feel every Chinese citizen has the responsibility to finish viewing it. Because this is a pain for our nation that is impossible to get rid of,” said a content creator who went to the memorial. She has more than 18 million followers on Douyin.
That same day, a Chinese man in Shenzhen stabbed a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy, who later died of his injuries. It was the second such attack in China involving Japanese nationals in three months.
It was the most serious of a string of anti-Japanese incidents in China in recent years, spurred by the remembrance of wartime history between the two countries which remains an emotionally fraught topic for the Chinese.
The Japanese invasion spread to the rest of China from 1937, and by 1945, when the war ended, millions of Chinese had died.
In the aftermath of the attack on the boy, then Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa asked her counterpart, Wang Yi, to conduct a full investigation, provide a clear explanation to Japan and implement preventive measures.
Wang said China will handle the “isolated case” in accordance with the law and urged Japan to view the issue calmly and not politicise it. The pair had met on Sept 23 on the sidelines of a United Nations event in New York.
Now, the Chinese are going through a soul-searching process, with online discussions reflecting on whether nationalistic education in China could have played a role in stirring violent acts, even as police investigations have not revealed any motive for the attack.
Such education broadly refers to what is taught in school textbooks, mass media such as war films, documentaries and news reports, as well as commemorative events and official speeches by Chinese leaders.
The Chinese have complex and deep-seated feelings about Japan.
Many laid wreaths at the Japanese school in Shenzhen after the Sept 18 incident and condemned violence towards ordinary Japanese people.
At the same time, many believe negative feelings towards Japan are justified and they support the government in its efforts in maintaining an awareness of history, such as the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, when an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
Xiao Zhonghua, 58, said Chinese people commemorate the Mukden Incident – when the Japanese detonated dynamite at a Japanese-controlled railway line near Mukden, today’s Shenyang, on Sept 18, 1931, blamed it on the Chinese and used it as a pretext to invade Manchuria – to remember a time when China was weak and to guard against the revival of Japanese militarism.
“Japanese politicians’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine constantly irritate and remind the Chinese that they do not admit their mistakes. How do you think this makes the Chinese feel?” he added.
The last time a sitting Japanese prime minister visited the shrine, which honours the country’s war dead, was in December 2013, by Shinzo Abe, although other politicians have continued to make regular trips.
It is a major sore spot for Beijing, which views such visits as attempts to legitimise Japan’s past militarism.
At the same time, most Chinese people are patriotic, said Mr Xiao, a Wuhan-based economics professor by profession who frequently blogs on a range of issues, from international affairs to the stock market.
This being said, the Chinese public is also disdainful of unrealistic film and television shows on the Sino-Japanese war, such as those depicting Chinese soldiers with superhuman strength killing Japanese soldiers, he said. “If this reflects an ‘anti-Japanese’ theme, then most Chinese people do not support it.”
A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said on Sept 23 that “China does not teach its people to hate Japan”, in response to a reporter’s question about anti-Japan comments on social media after the Shenzhen incident.
He added that learning from history is “not for perpetuating hatred but for avoiding the tragedy of war from repeating itself”.
Still, the fear among the Japanese community in China in the wake of the incident stems from an atmosphere of Chinese hostility towards them, both online and in the real world, against the backdrop of China-Japan ties strained by territorial disputes, geopolitical rivalry and the Chinese perception that the Japanese are unrepentant over their war atrocities.
When Mr Abe was assassinated in Japan in July 2022, eateries in China ran promotions to “celebrate” his death.
Xenophobic comments had to be deleted by online platforms such as Weibo and Douyin when a Chinese man attacked a Japanese mother and her three-year-old son with a knife in Suzhou in June.
Even as the Chinese authorities vowed a thorough investigation, experts believe the Communist Party of China (CPC) has a vested interest in keeping anti-Japanese sentiment simmering.
For example, in 2017, China’s Ministry of Education ordered primary and secondary school textbooks to move the start year of the Chinese war of resistance against the Japanese from 1937 to 1931.
The move placed greater emphasis on the 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Previously, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, was taken to mark the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted until the surrender of Japanese troops in China on Sept 9, 1945.
Observers saw the move as partly to burnish the CPC’s credentials in resisting the Japanese invasion.
Associate Professor Yinan He, an expert on China-Japan relations at Lehigh University in the United States, noted that Chinese historical narratives on Japan have changed over time, based on the political objectives of the CPC.
For instance, in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, official propaganda started to focus more on Japanese wartime atrocities and heroic Chinese resistance fighters as part of efforts to boost the CPC’s legitimacy.
Chinese accounts have been one-sided and offer only a partial truth by neglecting other aspects of history that could provide balance, said Prof He, who has written extensively on Sino-Japanese history.
These include the generous economic aid provided by Japan to China that helped the Chinese economy to take off after the war, and the changes in Japanese society since then.
“I see Chinese history education and the narratives in the mass media as a big contributing factor to the situation today (of an antagonistic view towards Japan).”
Joshua Zhang, 38, said patriotic education in school often focuses on foreign invaders, and patriotic language is often mixed with insults and ridicule, including terms such as “Japanese devils”.
The Nanjing-based computer programmer, who spoke out on social media about the possible negative effects of patriotic education, believes that whether intentional or not, educators have sown the seeds of hatred in the hearts of students, to varying degrees.
Even if Japan has committed heinous crimes against China, every later generation of ordinary Japanese people should not be asked to pay for them anew.
“When will the cycle of revenge end? The bitter taste experienced by the older generation is passed on to the next. This makes no sense,” he said. - The Straits Times/ANN
