The ghosts of Jiang, Koizumi haunt Hu's visit to Tokyo
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
President Hu Jintao, the quintessential Chinese Communist Party apparatchik who made it to the top by relentless kowtowing to superiors and keeping his head down in controversies, doesn’t know much about the world of the Japanese geisha. Nor does anyone else these days since it is long since departed alas! with most of the other emoluments of Japanese feudalism.
But “what draws a man to the geisha world is the feeling of being sheltered by a zashiki [a banquet room] from relentless pressures to adapt” is one definition of the critical role it once played in Japanese life. And Hu can use some of that. For the moment he leaves his Beijing problems – declining American exports, bankrupt banks, corruption scandals [real and political], food shortages, inflation, a new virus outbreak, corrupt and errant local Communist cadre, Tibetan and Uighur rebels, natural and man-made transportation disasters — and an Olympics extravaganza galloping from one disaster to another.
In the longest visit he has made to any foreign clime — he had never been out of the country before he rose to the top of the hierarchy, not old enough to have sat at the feet of China’s former Soviet Communist mentors in Russia. In Tokyo he was making the protocol rounds in early May, everything from university assemblies to kissing babies. Although there are a welter of issues between Beijing and Tokyo, none are likely to get more than a cursory review this time around. And although this is written during the visit, no breakthroughs are expected.
Then why go?
To clean up a bit of messy recent history.
Hu’s visit is in marked and stated contrast to his predecessor Jiang Zemin. In 1998 Jiang poured salt into old wounds, reminding the Japanese repeatedly of their more than half century of aggression against the desiccated corpse of the Chinese empire [Sino-Japanese War 1894-5], Manchukuo [the Japanese puppet state in northwest China 1932-1945], “the China Incident” [1937-41], and the Great Pacific War [1941-45]. Jiang took every opportunity to scold contemporary Japanese leadership, much of it related by blood to forebears who had either collaborated or acquiesced in some of the greatest atrocities in modern history. The Japanese, whose leaders have apologized to the Chinese [and others] repeatedly, who paid a heavy price for their transgressions, and who believe they have lived up to the world’s highest expectations for half a century, were not amused.
Furthermore, when Jiang returned home he kept up the steady drumbeat of propaganda. He accused the Japanese of refusing to acknowledge that history, mindlessly blind, of course, to the refusal of his own generation to acknowledge the tens of millions killed by the Communists during the Mao Era or the international spectacle of the Tien An Mien massacre his Party sponsors ground down its own students and workers with tanks, only in 1989.
Whatever the moral calculus, Beijing’s whole campaign boomeranged.
When an anti-Japanese boycott threatened, more than one Japanese investor, mostly in manufacturing – then running at about $2 billion a year — began to back away, looking for cheap labor instead to Southeast Asia and India. And when anti-Japanese rhetoric and demonstrations threatened to get out of hand in the fall of 1996, official Beijing put on the brakes. Government sponsored demonstrations morphing into the real thing is hellishly frightening for an authoritarian regime. Chinese CCP leadership has made a fulltime curriculum of Ceausescu I, Ceausescu II, Ceausescu III — trying to take a lesson from the somewhat mysterious sudden collapse of their favorite European Communist dictator in the former Soviet empire.
China’s all-powerful Ministries of Public Security and State Security trotted out thousands of uniformed and plainclothes policemen in the major cities to prevent demonstrations on the anniversary of Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Anti-Japanese dissidents who had recently tried to reopen the issue of Japan's war reparations [initially refused by Nationalist President Chiang Kai-shek in 1945] were stowed in out-of-town guest houses and others put under house arrest. Beijing University students — whose predecessors the Communists had used against Chiang in their long struggle for power — had their anti-Japanese posters ripped down by security men. Party leadership remembers all too well how it was Beijing University students’ 1919 May Fourth Movement which ended dynastic China once and for all — and it arose out of a protest against Japan receiving parts of China as the spoils of war for siding with the Allies in World War I.
Beijing has been making that 180 degree turn, with starts and stops, ever since. But it has been camouflaged by Chinese propaganda and the leftwing Japanese media [echoed by less well informed colleagues in the West].
When Beijing seized on Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s voluntary departure from the kantei [the increasingly powerful Japanese prime minister’s office] to make amends, it was presented to the world as a change in Japanese policy. True enough, the short-serving Japanese Prime Minisiter Shinzo Abe made his ceremonial kow-tow to Beijing even before he visited Washington. But Abe had a long history of being, in fact, more hawkish on foreign policy issues than Koizumi.
The stick with which Beijing had beat Koizimu and refused to meet with him — his visits to Yasukuni Shrine — had been only a negotiating ploy. Koizumi had always made it clear he went to the shrine honoring Japan’s more than two million war dead. Early in his administration he had pointed out Japan had no equivalent monument to the U.S.’ Arlington Cemetery and unsuccessfully proposed to create something akin to it. He claimed the fact that some convicted World War II war criminals were also enshrined at Yasukuni he considered an accident of history and one he was not honoring. [Few of Koizumi’s American critics remembered that Ronald Reagan had flown in the face of criticism to honor all the German war dead at Bitburg Cemetery including dead SS veterans after he had paid homage to Hitler’s victims at the site of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.]
But the myth continues. When Abe flunked out as prime minister [despite being a descendant of several gifted politicians], Yasuo Fukuda [also the scion of a former successful prime minister] was ushered in by the Japanese and Chinese media as being more “friendly” to China. Ironically, everyone ignored the fact he had spent his business career in an oil company with its origins in Japanese Occupied China! In fact, Fukuda has taken a correct but cool position on the issues related to China. And with his own prime ministry now reeling from a series of missteps and scandals, he could well give way to one of the two more hawkish candidates awaiting in the wings to take over the more than comfortable Liberal Democrat majority in the Diet — former foreign minister Taro Aso, or the vedette candidate for Japan’s first woman PM, Yuriko Koike.
But time hasn’t waited on the swing in Chinese policy toward Japan. Partly as a result of the cold shower Jiang and Company had thrown at the Japanese, and partly due to fast moving events in East Asia and the world, Japanese policy has speeded up its fairly steady, harder line, not often in Beijing’s direction..
Despite Chinese protestations, the Japanese are integrating their defenses increasingly with the already 50-year-old American nuclear shield in the Western Pacific by participation in U.S. anti-missile defenses. Paralleling American officials’ public complaints, the Japanese had called on the Chinese for more transparency and asked, too, against whom Beijing’s growing Chinese military expenditures is directed. China’s official 418 billion yuan [$60 billion] for 2008, up 17.6 percent on 2007 – and most foreign observers believed this is a huge understatement of real expenditures — far outstrips Japan's own growing defense budget, bloated because of high procurement costs rigged to introduce domestic technology transfers. The Japanese renamed Ministry of Defense – it’s is still Self-Defense Forces under MacArthur’s “no war” clause in its constitution still to be amended — has occasionally spoken, quietly but officially, of the growing Chinese threat.
Abe, despite his ill-fated prime ministry, had made his reputation on taking a strong stand on the North Korean issue, not only its nuclear weapons program but the unresolved kidnapping of Japanese citizens over a couple of decades – one of the most politically charged issues in recent Japanese politics. Neither Fukuda nor anyone following him is going to be permitted by the Japanese public to drop the issue’s priority. The unresolved kidnapping dispute with Kim Jong-Il has even produced friction with Washington [as well as Beijing] with Tokyo demanding it be made a part of any of the now questionable settlement being negotiated with North Korea. It is a sensitive issue with the Chinese, too, who are in effect chairing and taken responsibility for completing any agreement by supposedly reining in their “Little Brother” in Pyongyang.
For China’s relations with Japan, as with the U.S., Taiwan remains a central issue. Tokyo, as Washington, has stated emphatically that it supports "one China" that includes Taiwan. But Japan’s ties with the island are very deep – culturally as well as economically, a product of its 50-year rule there when Taiwan was [unlike Korea] considered “a home [Japanese] island”. Japanese military strategists since its emergence as a modern state in the mid-19th century has always seen Taiwan’s disposition with its crucial position astride the sealanes to Southeast Asia [and all the more important now because of Japan’s heavy dependence on Mideast oil] as critical to Japan’s defenses.
Although Fukuda, as Abe and Koizumi, have proffered the possibility of settling one of the main issues with China by joint development, the exploitation of gas reserves in contested areas between the two countries in the East China Sea, so far the Chinese have refused to compromise. If Hu were to make such an offer during this visit – not expected now by either side — it would go a long way toward bucking up Fukuda’s disastrous fall in popularity. For there is no denying that the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo remains the most important bilateral one in East Asia and the Japanese public as well as its politicians, whatever their views on other subjects, are extremely sensitive to it.
Hu will again press the Japanese to use their influence in Taiwan to press for acceptance of a Beijing formula [for “one country, two systems] with which it tries to entice a closer relation with Taipei. But Tokyo has been wary of any such commitment in the past, and has, uncharacteristically for the always cautious Japanese, associated itself with recent American declarations of the need for a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan-Mainland issue, an ironclad commitment Beijing is unwilling to make as it bolsters its offensive weapons on the Mainland against the Island.
China’s attitudes has played a role in pushing the Japanese, into attempting, again,to buck up their political and commercial relationship with India, China’s economic rival and potential geopolitical menace. It’s been tried before without success. But India’s attempt to liberalize its economy, its enormous natural resources and potential markets for Japan, are always an attractive if will-O-the-wisp goal because of cultural as well as economic difficulties. Washington, pushing “the Quad”, a strategic alliance of Japan, India, the U.S., and Australia has been nurturing the possibilities of a growing U.S.-India political and military as well as economic collaboration. [But the new China-first Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave Washington heartburn when he announced future continued joint military exercises would not continue – in the presence of a visiting Chinese official standing next to him!]
But counter intuitively, despite all these unresolved frictions, Tokyo’s economic relationship with China not only continues but flourishes. China has replaced the U.S. as Japan’s No. 1 trading partner – two-way trade totaled $236.6 billion in 2007. Although Japan was only China's third biggest trading partner, behind the European Union and the United States, last year, the importance of Japanese transfer of technology – including managerial expertise it gets along with the Taiwanese – is a critical part of China’s attempt to modernize. Although it gets less publicity from the often superficial analyses of Western observers, the Chinese in their boom times still instinctively look to the Japan model for their progress toward modernization. However much the contemporary Chinese leadership has reverted to the old traditions of the Middle Kingdom, and China as the center of the East Asia world, the fact that Japan was the only non-European society to make it into the modern industrial world — almost a hundred years before the Chinese – is not forgotten. Here, too, however, there are small but important aggravations – adulterated and poisoned Chinese food imports, the fact that Tokyo wants China off its list of “underdeveloped countries’ getting concessionary aid, and the troubles of the inflexible Japanese executives everywhere running their multinationals from their own Japanese-only ghettoes.
There’s not much hope during this geisha party for Hu to resolve or even make a dent in any of these issues. It took a while for them to develop and none of them would go away quickly.
But Hu is going through the motions — all the former Japanese prime ministers have been served up for their roles in playing those idiotic games played at geisha parties. But there is a dog that doesn’t bark. Koizumi has not been invited, modesty being the better part of discretion according to the always professional diplomats at Japan’s Gaimusho [foreign office]. However, with Koizumi’s Revolution in the Japanese economy and politics still very much in motion, if sub rosa, and he likely to be an important part of picking Japan’s next — and hopefully longer serving — chief executive, it may be the one essential party pooper that should not have been left out by Hu in smoothing over this most important East Asia relationship.