Old China hands have watched for months fascinated with Chinese Communist leaders’ determination to antagonize the Japanese people as well as their political elite. Asia’s Cold War is a growing feud between the Continent’s two leading powers – everything from submarine intrusions, to undiplomatic speeches about the ‘stupidity:” of Japan’s prime minister, to hassles over deepwater oil and gas reserves between the two countries.
Chinese statements have increasingly fed Japanese currents calling for abandoning Japan’s post-WWII pacifism and pushing for closer military collaboration with the U.S. Surely, foreign observers have speculated, this does not serve China’s interests.
Instead of tugging on that strong millennial-old Japanese cultural umbilical cord and exploiting growing contemporary economic ties, Beijing has chosen to wave the bloody shirt – recalling horrors of Tokyo’s atrocities of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The campaign has a certain resonance in Japan and other Asian countries. [The latter is exaggerated by Western media who forget for many Asians the Japanese claim they liberated Asia from European colonialism rings true. Asian nationalists often looked to Japan after its 1905 victory over Imperial Russia, and Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, even the Philippines, had strong lengths to pre-1945 Japan.]
Beijing has made Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the prewar State Shinto Yasukuni Shrine a major controversy. Yasukuni houses remains of Japan’s wartime leaders convicted by an international court for war crimes. But as Koizumi earlier pointed out, Japan has no other major war dead memorial. Early on, he suggested perhaps a second and less controversial monument might be created. But Chinese harrowing has precluded any conservative Japanese politician inaugurating the difficult protocol. Meanwhile, Japanese leaders have repeatedly apologized for wartime crimes -- even though radical nationalists do pop up time to time as they do elsewhere.
Never mind Beijing speaks to a Japanese generation who did not participate in those sorry events, a regime deriving its power from one of the bloodiest dictatorships in history, still refusing to acknowledge much less make amends for massacring students and workers at Tiananmen only just over a decade ago.
Looking for rationality behind Chinese strategy is, as always divining Beijing policymaking seen through a glass darkly. It could be just ignorance of the outside world – both President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, for narrow Party maneuvering, eschewed any contaminating foreign contact before their ascent to power. That would make them putty in the hands of xenophobia built into centuries of Chinese belief in cultural superiority, that China is, indeed, the central kingdom, the center of the world. [And who are those “hairy little dwarfs in the Eastern Sea” anyway!]
Proof has been forthcoming in Beijing’s handling of what they themselves have made into a central issue, the reintegration of Taiwan with the Mainland. Beijing has overplayed its hand, strengthening those Taiwan politicians either trying desperately to maintain de facto sovereignty or even those who want another de jure independent Chinese state.
But taking a cue from Beijing’s now partially abandoned Marxian/economic determinist lexicon, it just may be the explanation lies in its economic relationship with what is still the world’s second most powerful economy. Chiang Kai-shek after the Allied victory in World War II, refused Japanese reparations in the hope of a future partnership. Knowledge of Japanese discipline and industry gained as a Chinese Imperial exchange student had convinced him Japan’s modernization in a few short decades – the only successful one by any non-European power – had to be instructive for China. But in addition to using Chiang’s understanding as a propaganda weapon against him, his successors, the Communists, have taken an opposite political line.
That’s despite back at the counting table, Chinese-Japanese business goes on apace. China's imports of Japanese steel, computers and other goods doubled between 2000 and 2004. China passed the U.S. as Japan's No. 1 trade partner last year. Japanese direct investment in China totaled 490.9 billion yen [$4.23 billion] in the year ended last March, up 38 percent from the previous year. More than half of Japan's foreign investment in Asia goes to China.
So where’s the beef?
Since the normalization of relations between Tokyo and Beijing in 1976, Japan has given more than $30 billion in official development assistance [ODA] to China – grants, low-interest loans, local currency loans, technical assistance, etc. It’s perhaps more critical to China’s politicians than the sum implies. Japanese lawmakers increasingly complained Beijing has not been grateful, expressed concern China diverted funds to its military program. So over the past several years, Tokyo has been negotiating for a mutually agreed end to these concessions – arguing China was no longer a developing country. [Significantly, India has overtaken China as top recipient of Japanese largesse.] China said no, Japan said yes. It’s just been announced that Tokyo is holding up this year’s budget “to make adjustments necessary on the Japanese side”. Prepare for new Beijing blasts.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
