China Parades 'The Guilty' To Placate Japan

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 4-27-2005 | Richard Spencer

[blam]

China parades 'the guilty' to placate Japan

By Richard Spencer in Beijing
(Filed: 27/04/2005)

Chinese police have paraded 42 anti-Japanese protesters on television, in the clearest sign that the communist leadership is determined to halt violent demonstrations and set a friendlier tone towards Tokyo.

Some of the detainees, caught on camera hurling bottles and vandalising Japanese restaurants and cars in Shanghai 11 days ago, made public confessions.

"I let down my university, my teachers as well as my students," said Yin Xiufeng, a university physical education instructor. "I hope others can learn a lesson from me."

The public display of contrition - the nearest the Chinese are likely to come to an apology for the protests - comes as the Communist Party launches a propaganda campaign aimed at toning down anti-Japanese feelings.

Li Zhaoxing, the foreign minister, told a rare gathering of 3,500 cadres at Beijing's Great Hall of the People that they should not join the protests. "Living together in friendship with co-operation is a win-win formula and the only correct choice in the interests of both peoples," he told them.

The freedom given to three weekends of protest across China this month contrasted sharply with the authorities' hostility to other forms of political activity.

The demonstrators, organised by nationalistic student groups and websites such as japanpig.com, called for a boycott of Japanese products.

Mr Li's lecture, broadcast at peak-time on national television, outlined the reasons not to provoke Japan.

"Japan is China's important neighbour with merged mutual interests which are inseparable," he said. "Frequent and close contacts within the context of economic globalisation trends must continue to develop."

Japanese firms have invested £35 billion in China in recent years and two million Chinese work for them. Mr Li's comments were a significant admission that whatever China's ambitions as a world power, its economy is reliant on places such as Japan, Taiwan and the United States, whose geopolitics its staunchly opposes.

Separately, the propaganda department has organised lecture tours around Chinese universities by former ambassadors to Japan.

"To boycott Japanese products, how many Chinese would lose their jobs?" said one former ambassador, Wu Jianmin.

"We can't say Japanese people are bad. If we don't get this clear, it will result in the misleading idea that being against Japan is to love China. Wrong. To stand against the actions of Japanese Rightists is to love our country."

The confessions are a response to a public apology by Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, for his country's war-time role.

The protests were triggered by Tokyo's licensing of a history text book glossing over Japan's war-time atrocities, including the Nanjing massacre when hundreds of thousands of Chinese were killed.

Government and state media encourage "patriotic sentiment", particularly as the ideological basis for Communist Party rule is submerged under consumerism.

But although this is usually presented as a case of a rising China seeking to acquire diplomatic clout, there is evidence that what Beijing really fears is growing strategic weakness.

It fears being encircled, with the American military based in Afghanistan to the west and Korea to the east, and the last thing it needs is to encourage Japanese militarisation.

Sixteen of the 42 detainees shown on television were formally charged with "disturbing social order", while the remaining 26 were put in "short-term detention".

The Chinese continue to maintain that the protests were largely peaceful and the fault of the Japanese because of their insensitivity to -history.

But a spokesman said yesterday: "Regarding the recent anti-Japan protests, we do not approve of the excesses."

Attention will now turn to the next key date - May 4, the anniversary of nationalist anti-Japanese demonstrations in 1919.

The fact that such demonstrations later progressed into communist insurrection is not lost on the present party leadership, which has made clear that no repeat will be tolerated.

[Wudan Master]

I said several times earlier that this whole charade is just "diplomatic shadow-boxing", or a game of "diplomatic poker"

something which both Japan and China knows how to spar quite well