Posted on 04/22/2005 5:40:08 AM PDT by Dr. Marten
YOU could be forgiven for smiling at East Asia's two giants bickering over school textbooks and rocky reefs, over how many apologies add up to an Apology and who should pontificate at the UN on behalf of Asia. Yet China-Japan wrangling, containable for now, could yet explode and make Middle East violence seem like kids throwing stones.
East Asia is the axis of world power, because the US, China, Japan, and Russia intersect here as nowhere else.
Coiled Japan and theatrical China have seldom got on well. War between them in 1894-95, starting over Korea, undermined China's last dynasty and gave Taiwan to Japan. Widespread war again occurred from 1937 to 1945, as Japan's armies sought to put China under Japanese tutelage. Japan's attack doomed Chiang Kai-shek's rule and fuelled Mao Zedong's victory - and Tokyo lost control of Korea as well as Taiwan. Since 1945 only US power has prevented a resurgence of China-Japan rivalry, with all that would mean for Australia and other countries in the region.
Although the issues seem genteel, the China-Japan crisis is not really a surprise. China, buoyed by the world's gushing endorsement of its "rise"', believes it can lecture Japan with impunity. Just at this time Tokyo, thanks to North Korea's craziness, generational change in Japan, China's economic clout, and the flourishing Koizumi-Bush relationship, has forsaken bowing and scraping and become hard-nosed in its foreign policy.
Beijing's gripes with Tokyo are mostly spiritual. Younger Japanese are not willing to kowtow in unending shame for World War II. Japan has an economy three times the size of China's (with 10per cent of China's population), which rankles a Middle Kingdom used, until the 19th century, to being No.1. It judges Japan morally unfit for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.
Japan says it is graduation time for China. No longer poor and a victim, Beijing is seen to be shamelessly milking the World War II issue for concessionary loans and self-esteem. Many Japanese also see China's anti-Japan rhetoric as calculated political mythology -- and this indeed is the heart of the matter.
China's diplomatic awkwardness in the world is inseparable from its tight political control at home. Apologies, textbooks, uninhabited islands, war memories -- all become painted faces and props in the Beijing opera of the paternalistic Chinese state's cultural and foreign policies. Marxism has mostly lost its hold over Chinese minds. But truth and power emanate from one fount: historically the emperor's court, today the Communist Party. The hold of the Chinese Communist regime over its people depends on belief in the cries and groans of the Beijing opera.
One opera act can give way to a surprising sequel. Folk in the People's Republic were taught to love the Soviet Union and then to hate it. India was esteemed in the 1950s and vilified in the '60s. Vietnam was "as close as lips and teeth" in the '60s yet invaded by Chinese armies in 1979. When Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka tried to apologise directly to Mao for World War II in 1972, Mao brushed him off, saying the "help" provided by Japan's invasion of China made possible the Communist victory in 1949.
The moment's raison d'etat is supreme. Turning on rhetoric, emotion, and government-sanctioned demonstrations is an easy trick. Since political safety valves are lacking in Chinese society, no one knows the relative weight in the anti-Japan demonstrators' motivations among (a) dislike of Japan, (b) doing what supervisors prompt and (c) letting off steam by shouting slogans in the street (normally forbidden in China) that might end up annoying a Chinese government seen as condescending and corrupt.
On textbooks, a projection identification occurs. Dynastic regimes in East Asia all viewed history as the province of state orthodoxy. China and Vietnam, putting Leninist dress on the skeleton of traditional autocracy, still do. Japan and Taiwan, as democracies, do not.
No book of any kind attacking the Communist Party's monopoly of power in China has been published in China in the 56 years of the PRC. Some of the most trenchant books anywhere in the world on Japanese war atrocities have been written, published, and widely read in Japan. Beijing seems to think that because its textbooks jump to government policy, Japan's do too. But they do not. In Japan, unlike in China, there are government-sponsored textbooks as well as independent ones.
The blunt truth is that reasonable Chinese, Japanese, and other scholarly estimates vary widely for Chinese killed by Japan in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and in World War II. They also do for Chinese killed by their own Communist government in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (no apologies, yet, for these mishaps; what's a million here, 10million there, among comrades?). No one textbook can embody final truth.
The main text for middle-school history in China devotes nine chapters to Japan's aggression against China in the 19th and 20th centuries, but does not mention China's invasion of Japan under the Yuan Dynasty. (Vietnam comes off even worse than Japan. Nothing is said of the Han Dynasty's conquest of Vietnam or of China's 1000-year colonisation of thecountry.)
China has enjoyed a good run in relations with Japan and reaped economic benefit. The very real horror of war is one reason and the skilful political theatre practised by Beijing is another. But the mood in Japan toward China has changed and Beijing may be miscalculating. China will certainly pull back from the brink of a real rupture; it has too much to lose. But it is not certain that Tokyo will lie down and take any more abuse, vandalism, and Chinese distortions of history.
Australia and other friends of China and Japan should talk earnestly to both powers about the crucial role of the Japan-China relationship for peace in East Asia. Maybe there could be a three-way summit, not yet tried, where US, Japanese and Chinese leaders discuss face to face their mutual responsibility for peace in the Korea Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. With due respect to Europe, Washington has more to talk about with Japan and China than with the members of the European Union.
Ultimately, however, calm management from all quarters will only go so far in steadying Japan-China relations. Japan is a democracy and China is a dictatorship, and while that continues, the root problem is China's political system. Canberra, Washington, and other democratic capitals should tell Beijing that an open society is necessary for history to be viewed steadily and for international business exchanges to succeed.
After former president Jiang Zemin, during a 1998 trip to Japan, gave endless speeches on World War II, the Japanese chief cabinet secretary said in frustration: "Isn't this a finished problem?" But Japan's past transgressions may never be a finished problem while a Leninist-imperial state exists in Beijing.
Ross Terrill, a research associate in East Asian studies at Harvard University, is author of The New Chinese Empire (University of NSW Press, 2003).
As long as we (The U.S.) have bases and Navy in that part of the world and superior technology to the Chinese, The Japanese and Taiwanese will always have an advantage over the Chinese, if not by themselves.
Good! Looking forward to it.
Basicaly China says it is urresponsible,burdens Jaapan for the past, all this with nukes.Powers with nukes who practice irresponsability are fearsome and need to be called to account if not disarmed,willing or not.
Japan practices responsaability and is humble in terms of nuclear responsabilities undertaking.
I don't know what you do not understand bout evil and good.
"I don't know what you do not understand bout evil and good."
Um, why are you directing this statement to me?
I don't follow.
bumping for later comment ;-)
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