On a Sino-Japanese Moment and Some Antecedents
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Volume 3 | Issue 5 | Article ID 1713 | May 19, 2005 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Mirrors of History: On a Sino-Japanese Moment and Some Antecedents Geremie Barme Mirrors of History: On a Sino-the fascinating yet unsettling face of China’s Japanese Moment and Somecontemporary cheery authoritarianism, is the mass SMS (Short Message Service) mobile text Antecedents messages that went streaming out to phone users throughout Beijing from the start of this by Geremie R. Barmé holiday season. I believe that mass mailings of text messages were made by all the leading telecoms in Beijing at the behest of the Public Security Bureau (but, one wonders, who paid the tab?). They articulate in the truncated language of the SMS, something familiar to us May 4 2005 marked the 76th anniversary of the all, the latest party line on public antagonism to iconic Chinese patriotic protest movement. It Japan. Let me share three of the messages that was the day in 1919 when students led popular were sent to me yesterday, May 4, from protests against Japan’s imperial ambitions in bemused and befuddled friends in Beijing with China. It was also a seminal moment in the you: historical construction of modern China, prefiguring and also influencing the rise of the ‘The Beijing Public Security Bureau would like Communist Party itself in 1921,and marking a to remind you of the following: don’t believe stage in the cultural and social transformation rumors, don’t spread rumours, express your that remains at the heart of modern Chinese patriotic fervor in rational ways. Don't identities. participate in illegal demonstrations. –Wangtong Telecommunications wishes you a May 4, Youth Day, and May 1, International happy Labour Day!’ Labor Day, now fall within a weeklong holiday in China. This year that holiday is being ‘Don’t create trouble when all you want to do is celebrated in many ways during a period of help! Be patriotic, but don’t break the law. Be a particular tension. There are reports ofsolid, law-abiding citizen.’ busloads of police and soldiers being deployed to protect Japanese interests in the Chinese ‘Usually you’re busy and exhausted, so let this capital and other cities; there are also reports be a happy Labor Day holiday week. We can of a high state of vigilance on the part of the only build a harmonious society if we are authorities regarding any mass protests against disciplined and respect the law.’ Japan following from the outpourings of April. [‘Beijingshi Gonganju tiqing nin, bu xinyao, bu One of the interesting aspects of official chuanyao, lixing biaoda aiquo reqing. Bu canjia attempts to reign in volatile popular emotions, feifa youxing huodong. Zhongguo wangtong an aspect of no great significance but one gongsi zhu nin Wuyijie kuaile!’ wherein, I believe, we can catch a glimpse of ‘Bangmang buyao tianluan, aiguo buyao weifa, 1 3 | 5 | 0 APJ | JF zuo yige zunji shoufade hao gongmin.Facing up to history, respecting history, Zhongguo wangtong gongsi zhu nin Wuyijie learning the lessons of history are all themes of kaile!’ both official and popular protests against ‘Pingri manglu xinku, Wuyi changjia kuaile, Japan’s officially-sanctioned textbooks, the goujian hexie shehui, dingyao zunji shoufa.’] visits of government officials to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and the perceived failure of As the mass protests against Japan unfolded in Japan as a nation to show full and continued cities throughout China this April, the Chinese contrition for the acts of imperial aggression Premier Wen Jiabao, who was on an official throughout East and Southeast Asia before and visit to New Delhi, remarked at a news during WWII. conference that: I remember well as a young scholar living in Kyoto in 1982 hearing about and then being "Only a country that respects history, takes party to the heated discussions of Chinese responsibility for its past, and wins over the students at Kyoto University when the first trust of the people of Asia and the world at ructions regarding Japanese high-school large can take greater responsibility in the textbooks appeared. The texts being protested international community." against then used the vocabulary of modest obfuscation to describe the egregious acts of Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Qin Gang, the aggression in China, in particular at the time of Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the bloody when addressing the regular media briefing for occupation of Nanjing and the invasion of East foreign and Chinese journalists, that the China. Such popular discontent has been a protests were "totally spontaneous." feature of the creation of the ‘public’ since the Furthermore, reported China Daily the official end of the Cultural Revolution. The outrage and English-language newspaper in China, they despair felt by Chinese colleagues then has, in were “prompted by the Chinese public's later generations, only grown as new texts, dissatisfaction at ‘the bad practice and attitude even if only marginal within the Japanese adopted by the Japanese side on its history of education system, feed into a perception that aggression.’ ” [1] China’s neighbour continues to avoid confronting its—albeit imperial—past. There is Indeed, we should note that through the media an abiding—and even mounting—sentiment the Chinese authorities promote themselves as that ‘Japan’ continues to be insensitive to the the natural representatives and energetic feelings of others in the region in regard to that defenders of China’s national interests (integral past, and that it is a nation that is incapable of to the ‘three representatives’ [sange daibiao] redressing those wrongs through meaningful, catechism formulated by former Party General substantive and sustained acts and expressions Secretary Jiang Zemin, who was in turn taking of official contrition. This is also despite the a page from the Selected Works of Mao fact that the issue of comfort women and the Zedong), egging on nationalistic outbursts atrocities in Nanjing are now mentioned in while at the same time retaining the right to some texts, even if inadequately. At the same repress them. The authorities would exercise time, continuous regional unease and even this right when Shanghai’s Liberation Daily hostility towards Japan appears to have published on 22 April an editorial in which a encouraged and legitimated a resurgence of heinous plot with murky aims was spoken of in neo-nationalism in Japan itself. a prelude to the further suppression of mass unrest. Injunctions such as Premier Wen Jiabao’s to 2 3 | 5 | 0 APJ | JF learn from history and not to repeat the Communist Party as the ruling party on the mistakes of the past are common in China mainland invoked the crimes, the mass today. Indeed, such admonitions have been murders, the deadly policies and the class characteristic of elite political pronouncements, warfare essayed by the KMT as a justification historical writings, thought and philosophy in for its rule and its ruthless repression of China from well before the Christian era. The opponents. For its part, the KMT government classical expression yi shi wei jian, ‘use history on Taiwan never tired in its propaganda against as a mirror’ (in which one reflects on one’s own the ‘Communist bandits’ on the mainland to image), is still in common usage. speak of the brutality, violence and mass murders being perpetrated by their enemies, However, some commentators—dissenting the victors in the Civil War of the late 1940s writers on the Chinese-language Internet, and and the founders of the People’s Republic of scholars and political scientistsChina. A rhetorical pitched battle between internationally—were much exercised by Wen these contenders for national political and Jiabao’s magisterial and, they observed,cultural legitimacy was once bellicose and patronizing statement. Many were quick to incessant. It continues today with different point out that, if the Chinese government wants actors and in muted form. to invoke history as a guide to the present, and to use it as a standard by which countries Having said this, let me speak of histories of a should measure themselves, then China and the more recent provenance, histories that are also Communist Party that rules it, should take a related to protests, outpourings of emotion and long hard look at their own woeful record. questions of constructed truthfulness. Many said that China itself has little respect for the truths of history or that as a nation it was First, a snapshot from twenty years ago. On 19 incapable of formulating a suitably responsible May 1985, a soccer riot broke out in Beijing attitude to its own past (be it that of the deadly after a match between the Chinese and then 1950s, the suppression of the Lhasa Uprising, independent Hong Kong soccer teams at the the famine of the early 60s, the Cultural Worker’s Stadium in the Chinese capital. It was Revolution era, or in regard to more recent the first large-scale spontaneous riot in the popular ructions such as the repression of capital since the end of the Cultural Revolution. peaceful mass protests in 1989 and 1999). Angry crowds overturned cars, stopped taxis and harassed foreigners. Anti-foreign slogans Adding further to the overlapping of histories, were chanted and many violent clashes took and accounts of atrocities and violence—and I place involving police and militia. Numerous don’t raise these to confuse the issues being international media reports spoke of the discussed today, but as a way to alert this hooligans involved as being like the Boxer audience to the complex historical cross rebels of 1900 who sacked foreign legations in currents that flow through the private and the imperial capital; an inchoate mob involved Internet discussions and debates concerning in a xenophobic frenzy.