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Foreign Correspondent INSIDE TRACK ON WORLD NEWS by international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis |
ANTI-JAPANESE RAGE SHAKES CHINACopyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2005May 2, 2005 NEW YORK - Chinese usually rank among the world’s more intelligent people, but lately the red mandarins who run the People’s Republic have been doing some seriously un-intelligent things. First came a People’s Congress last March that declared any move by Taiwan to full independence would be deemed an act of war. This broadside was fired just as the European Union was about to end its arms embargo against China, which urgently seeks new, high-tech weapons. The EU, threatened by painful US retaliation if it sold arms to China, seized on Beijing’s threat to postpone ending the embargo until China’s human rights record improved. So Beijing shot itself in the foot. On the heels of this fiasco came the annual fracas over Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine. The Tokyo shrine commemorates Japan’s 2.5 million war dead since 1853, including remains of Japanese leaders executed as war criminals by US occupation authorities. Each year, Japan’s prime minister visits Yasukuni to pay respect to the fallen. On separate occasions, so do rightwing legislators. These visits always produces an annual outpouring of fury from China, the Philippines, North and South Korea (just about the only thing the two Koreas agree on), all of whom accuse Japan of war crimes and militarism. This year, China’s ritualized protests spread to students and turned into an explosion of anti-Japanese nationalism. Pouring fuel onto the fire, Japan’s high court denied compensation to Chinese victims of wartime atrocities. At first, Beijing encouraged anti-Japanese demonstrations as a useful way of trying to block Japan’s quest for a UN Security Council seat, and making the unloved Japanese lose face. As Chinese officials hurled insults at Tokyo, Japan-China relations hit their lowest point in 20 years. China indeed suffered terribly from Japanese invasion during WWII. From the 1937-1945, China lost an estimated 11.6 million dead: 3.2 million soldiers and 8.4 million civilians. Some 95 million Chinese became internal refugees. Japan’s Imperial Army, imbued by the samurai code of Bushido, believed all captured soldiers deserved death and enemy civilians were scum. The Imperial Army behaved with maximum savagery in China, Korea and the Philippines. But that was 1930 and 40’s Japan. Modern Japan bears little resemblance to that era and is ardently anti-militaristic. But by continuing Japan-bashing, China and the Koreas risk reigniting Japanese rightwing nationalism, and destabilizing North Asia. Chinese and Korean victims of medical experiments and forced prostitution should receive compensation from Japan. China is right to complain about Japanese textbooks that whitewash the war. But so do American, British, German, Canadian, and French textbooks. Try finding references in US textbooks about how B-29’s killed over 100,000 Japanese civilians during fire bomb raids on Tokyo on one single night. Chinese textbooks fail to mention 2 million `bourgeois’ executed by communists, millions jailed in China’s gulag, or the 30 million Chinese that perished in Mao’s demented Great leap Forward. If you add up those megadeaths, and throw in millions more from China’s 20-year civil war between Nationalists and Communists, Chinese appear to have killed far more of their own people than did the hated Japanese. While one fully understands and sympathizes with the rancor felt by China, Japan’s current generation had nothing at all to do with the 20th’s century’s crimes. Instead of raking up old coals, China and Japan need to find a way to share North Asia and deepen economic cooperation. Japan deserves and should have a seat on the UN Security Council. So should Germany, and India – when it settles the bloody Kashmir dispute. China’s opposition to Japan’s rightful UN seat is short-sighted and counter-productive. If more proof of this were needed, the government-encouraged anti-Japanese demonstrations that raged across China quickly ran out of control. Beijing became badly frightened, fearing the nationalist protests might develop into demands for democracy, or turn into a wide scale uprising against the Communist Party. The state press ended up denouncing the student protests as an `evil plot.’ The protests were suppressed. China’s restive students and Japan, China’s biggest investor, were left enraged. Fiasco number two. If the 20th century teaches one lesson, it’s that nationalism ranks among mankind’s greatest evils. Those who whip it up often reap the whirlwind. It’s time to end using World War II as a political weapon or a means of extorting money and trade or political concessions from the vanquished. In WWII, no one’s hands were clean. Forgive and forget.
To read previous columns by Mr. Margolis: Click here
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