Pro-China, Anti-Japan Protests - Page 113

On September 29 2012 02:52 either I or wrote:
What we need is to erase concepts of country and nationality.

On September 28 2012 11:05 oneofthem wrote:
oh man, ending to war? realize you not that the present world is much more safe and peaceful than the good olde days? it's also much less nationalistic than back in the imperial age. this is a sign of progress. let's be serious here and consider who is actually the moving force. i am pretty certain that in 300 years time china will be pretty well ordered, enlightened if you will. to get there takes a lot of effort though, just as the same efforts were carried out in the west.

On September 29 2012 03:03 oneofthem wrote:
if only you understood my positions you'd know they are right.

1. your theory is post-hoc rationalization, endowing an unintentional mass movement with collective agency because that's the way humans see collective action. this is dated by about 250 years. this model has its uses, but it is still your projection.
2. your little title is quite different from what follows. dunno why. look up padfoota's post for a taiwan perspective on the ground. keep in mind, nationalism is itself a political issue in taiwan's partisan political climate. this is to say, yes, nationalism is politically expedient for mass effect not only in china but elsewhere. look around you, even.
3. if the spell of grand national narratives of historical enemies create much of the confrontational context, then it seems rather obvious that you should cast away this spell to make any progress in the conflict.

pat on head.

On September 29 2012 02:53 Azarkon wrote:


The worst sort of idealism is one that presumes to understand without understanding, seeks to condemn without reflecting, and aims to guide without knowing where it's going. In the course of this thread, you and your allies have exhibited all three of these qualities:

Presumes to understand without understanding: 'nationalism is an infantile disease' and we ought to be rid of it - as opposed to an organizational development that was necessitated by industrialism and the competition between human groups

Seeks to condemn without reflecting: the Chinese [nationalists] are mindless followers of CCP propaganda - which is why the open societies of HK and Taiwan, neither of them followers of CCP propaganda, were among the first to protest / demonstrate against Japan

Aims to guide without knowing where it's going: the 'correct' solution to this problem is to overthrow the CCP / stop their totalitarian brainwashing - which is why the democratic KMT in Taiwan was the first to play a game of brinksmanship with Japan using its patrol vessels, and democratic South Korea is just as pissed at Japan over the Dokdo conflict

I suppose it's my mistake that rather than deny the validity of nationalism and its offspring, the nation-state, I choose instead to understand it. That rather than engaging in useless moral high horsing and condescension, I choose instead to state the practical outcome and solution. I suppose that makes me illogical and in need of a 'refutation' lest I 'influence the minds of youngsters' - because we all know that naive idealism, which breaks upon the first testing, is the best solution to the world's problems.

Even if the Politburo Standing Committee somehow could agree to revise Chinese school textbooks and stop commemorating anniversaries, they still cannot control events in Japan or the Chinese tabloids that report on them. “The Foreign Ministry and the Party leaders want to change public opinion about Japan, and leave history behind, but it is too late,” a PLA colonel told me. “We should have tried to change public opinion ten years ago when the Party could still control information. We can’t do it now.”

Chinese rage against Japan’s failure to acknowledge its wartime guilt has intensified instead of dissipating with time. Chinese young people are if anything more obsessed by the history question than are their parents or grandparents. The potent combination of official propaganda and the sensational popular media, both of which tend to exploit and heighten the notion of wartime suffering for their own purposes, have made people more conscious of this painful history than ever before. The popular media and Internet news sites trawl the international news for stories that will attract Chinese audiences. Anything related to Japan’s wartime history or its current military development is sure to interest the young urbanites who are also the target audience of advertisers. Every reported outrage sparks excited discussions on Internet chat rooms. The media and Internet buzz gives leaders and officials, as well as ordinary people, the impression that anti-Japanese fervor is sweeping the country and encourages people to join in collective action like petitions and protests because they know they won’t be alone. It also makes policymakers—particularly the politicians—feel they are under intense pressure from public opinion and forces them to react publicly to even minor slights from Japan.

Every perceived slight by Japanese leaders, every revision of Japanese textbooks —as well as every misstep by Japanese students studying in China or Japanese visitors to China—is an opportunity for tabloid newspapers and Internet Web sites to attract audiences and whip up popular passions. Any event that connects Taiwan and Japan, such as a private visit to Japan by former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui, is sure to arouse readers’ interest. A South China orgy involving a large group of Japanese businessmen and Chinese prostitutes that took place in September 2003—the anniversary of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931—first reported by China Youth Daily attracted more than seven thousand postings on prominent Web discussion sites in the first two days. Even flaws in Japanese products—the brakes failing on Mitsubishi jeeps or poor reception with Matsushita cell phones—are grist for the media and the chat rooms. Advertisements for Japanese products that inadvertently affront Chinese consumers—such as a Toyota ad that showed a Toyota Prado (unfortunately transliterated as Ba Dao, “the way of the hegemon”) driving in front of bowing Chinese stone lions under the line, “You cannot but respect the Ba Dao”—give people a chance to vent their anger toward Japan.

On September 29 2012 04:04 CountChocula wrote:

Not sure what you mean by "deny the validity of" nationalism when that's not my axe to grind at all. People can simply deny nationalism on moral reasons. I didn't know one cannot understand something, then reject it based on moral reasons. That's what makes you illogical--that you associate a rejection of nationalism on moral grounds with an inability to discuss nationalism as a factor in geopolitics.

Another place where you're wrong is that I didn't claim Chinese nationalists were mindless followers of CCP propaganda or even that this incident was started by CCP propaganda. I'm stating the view espoused in China: Fragile Superpower written by Clinton's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State that Jiang Zemin, for whatever reason, stepped up anti-Japanese nationalist propaganda in education to levels greater than those seen during the rules of Mao and Deng Xiaoping, and now that the proverbial genie has been let out of the bottle, the CCP finds it difficult to keep a balancing act. On the one hand, not pissing off their nationalistic countrymen so much so that they're overthrown and on the other, not pissing off Japan and the rest of the world.

In any case, it's not a grassroots movement like you speak of. It was started in the 90s by Jiang Zemin and now it's driven by a combination of state propaganda and sensational tabloids that capitalize on anti-Japanese articles bringing huge readership in a vicious feedback loop.

On September 29 2012 04:28 Azarkon wrote:




I've already gone through with you why your 'moral criticism' of nationalism is absent of logic. I'm not keen on repeating myself on a subject I've spent pages on already.

Your argument that this is all explained by propaganda Jiang enacted in the 90s fails to explain why South Korea, for example, also harbors virulent feelings against Japan. It also fails to explain why people who were educated before the 90s / not under the Chinese system also harbor such feelings, which runs against my own personal experience interacting with Chinese people in the West.

On September 29 2012 16:34 CountChocula wrote:

I can assure you that you did no such thing simply based on the fact that I only mentioned my argument against nationalism on the previous page. Before that, I didn't bother to explicitly give my argument against nationalism, because I assumed it was evident to most people who've lived through the 20th century the dangers of nationalism. I did, however, observe glaring flaws in your argument saying nationalism is an extension of tribalism and hence morally justified, which is what you might be thinking of.

I admit don't understand the situation in South Korea well, but I don't see how my mentioning of the fact that Jiang's propaganda in the 90s becomes invalid. It's certainly possible that the sentiments in South Korea are not as extreme as those in China, because we never hear of riots there where Japanese cars gets smashed up and their drivers get paralyzed after getting beaten.

I didn't say "this is all explained by propaganda by Jiang in the 90s"--I said he stepped it up in the 90s. This covers your second objection to the point too. There was anti-Japanese sentiment in people educated before the 90s too, but they aren't as prominent. This also explains the phenomenon of why most of the protesters we see at riots are young people.

On October 04 2012 04:17 ragz_gt wrote:
My feeling is that no one actually involved really care about who is right... only who is left.

On October 04 2012 01:58 Azarkon wrote:

Sentiments in Korea are capable of being just as extreme - it's just that Koreans are not drawn to the same style of rioting. However, there are annual protests against Japan in Korea, just as in China, that at times become quite extreme. Also, rioters at protests tend to be young regardless, because older people have a greater sense of their own social responsibility, and you have yet to answer how Jiang specifically targeted Japan in his 'patriotic' education - as my sources say, the target of Chinese rage in the 90s was the US, not Japan.

Jiang Zemin succeeded Deng Xiaoping as a compromise choice after Tiananmen and began to take charge in 1994 through 1995 as Deng’s health deteriorated. (Deng died in 1997 at the age of ninety-two.) Unlike Mao and Deng, Jiang lacked confidence. He worried about challenges from rival leaders and doubts from the public—memories of the Tiananmen crisis were fresh—and as a result, was much more attentive to nationalist public opinion. His intimidating face-to-face confrontations with anti-Japan student protestors when he served as mayor of Shanghai during the 1980s may also have made him fearful. When he spoke at his alma mater Jiaotong University in December 1986 to urge students to stop protesting, the students “heckled the mayor for spouting empty platitudes.” [1] And his personal history had left him with bad memories of the Japanese occupation.

Over time Jiang became personally invested in improving ties with Washington, but when it came to Japan, he hammered away at the history issue much more aggressively than his predecessors had. A senior official in the Chinese Foreign Ministry acknowledged, “China used to be quite accommodating to Japan under Mao and Deng,” but is much less so under Jiang. This official blamed the deterioration of Sino-Japanese relations on the dimming of Japan’s economic miracle and Japan’s growing resentment of China’s rise, but others were not so forgiving toward Jiang. “Mao and Zhou had the greatest moral right to hate the Japanese, but they responsibly made good relations with Japan because they thought strategically. Jiang is just playing patriotic games,” a think-tank expert told me.

Under Jiang, as China continued to move toward a capitalist-style economy, nationalism replaced communism as the rationale for people to support the Party. Beginning in 1994 the CCP Propaganda Department’s “patriotic education campaign,” designed to ensure the loyalty of its subjects—young people in particular—by nurturing their nationalist attachment to the state, became the dominant theme in school and media socialization. [2]

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II approached in 1995, schools and the media put the history of Japanese aggression against China front and center. President Jiang Zemin and his colleagues attended seventeen official celebrations of the Chinese victory over Japan during the summer of 1995. [3]

Because of anti-Japanese feelings stirred up by Jiang’s campaign, relations between China and Japan reached their lowest point in 1995 through 1996 since the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1972. [4] A vicious cycle developed. As scholar Gilbert Rozman described it, “China heightened Japan’s alarm and then took that alarm as evidence of nefarious intentions.” [5] China defied Japan’s request to halt nuclear testing and tested three times in 1995. Japan showed its dismay by discontinuing its aid to China, and China cited its historic grievance, saying that the aid was a form of war reparation and therefore must continue. Tension over the Diaoyu Islands reemerged, and Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto paid a personal visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, the first visit by a prime minister since 1985. (The visits by Nakasone and Koizumi were official.)

On October 04 2012 11:15 oneofthem wrote:
oh no they made me a virulent hate monger. gotta hate them more.

On September 29 2012 03:19 Azarkon wrote:


I understand your positions quite well, which is why I know they are wrong.

1. There is nothing accidental about nationalism. I don't have the time nor the patience to explain, so go away and read Ernest Gellner.
2. Padfoota speaks for all Taiwanese now? Ender116 also has a Taiwan tag next to his alias - does he speak for all Taiwanese too?
3. Every country has 'grand national narratives.' They serve to give its citizens an identity and a stake in that identity. Fail to do so, and what you have is not a country, but an unorganized group of individuals who, because they do not share a common identity, are easily divided and conquered by those who do. As for 'historical enemies,' have you ever considered the idea that this is a grassroots phenomenon and not merely an engineered one?

Try again.

On September 29 2012 03:06 RavenLoud wrote:

This is slowly happening thanks to the internet and globalization. It's still going to take a long time, and it really can't just suddenly erase history.

On September 29 2012 03:06 RavenLoud wrote:

This is slowly happening thanks to the internet and globalization. It's still going to take a long time, and it really can't just suddenly erase history.