Pro-China, Anti-Japan Protests - Page 114

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 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.)