China’s hostility to the Japanese is growing

Ten-year-old Shen Hangping was walking to school when he was stabbed to death. Japanese on his father’s side, Chinese on his mother’s, he was a student at the Japanese School in Shenzhen. There are only a small number of these expat schools across China, and they have recently become targets of Chinese nationalist anger. Shenzhen was the second such attack in three months. In June, a knife-wielding man tried to board a bus full of children attending the Japanese school in Suzhou. The Chinese bus attendant held him off: he killed her instead.

Knife attacks are not rare in China (in late September, a man killed three in a Shanghai shopping center) but what makes the Suzhou and Shenzhen attacks different is that they were almost certainly racially motivated. It’s highly unlikely to be a coincidence that Shen Hangping was attacked on the anniversary of the “Mukden incident,” a 1931 Japanese false-flag operation which led to the invasion of Chinese Manchuria.

The two school-directed attacks were manifestations of a new development in China’s long-standing fear and loathing of the Japanese. One recent bout of antagonism has been over Tokyo Electric Power’s plan to release mildly radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. Even though the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency approved the process and classified the radiation risks as “negligible,” the Chinese government and state media have been in a frenzy. China has banned all Japanese seafood while its censors took down scientific blogs that fact-checked and corrected the government’s apocalyptic warnings.

At the same time, China’s anti-espionage law has broadened the definition of spying, encouraging the public to keep a lookout for potential infiltrators in their midst (read: foreigners or Chinese who might have dealings with foreigners). Recent viral videos have linked Japanese schools to such activity.

The mood has become febrile and absurd. When Japan was hit with a major earthquake on New Year’s Day, keyboard nationalists celebrated the disaster as “retribution.” When the underground station in the regional capital of Nanning was accused of having the rising sun of the Japanese flag on its walls, it apologized and removed the image. A complete photograph showed that the image was, in fact, the circular spoke of a Chinese folding fan. Critics mocked the nationalists online: what else should be banned? Circles? Wheels?

Some eighty years after Japan’s withdrawal from China, Chinese people today love Japanese food, clothing, films, anime and even pornography (the actress Sora Aoi has cult status among millennial men). But none of this has dampened the Chinese antipathy to their former occupier.

There are still nonagenarian Chinese alive who were trafficked by the Japanese army to be “comfort women” for the invading soldiers, or who had family and friends killed. My home city of Nanjing is infamous for the 1937 massacre during which some 200,000 Chinese civilians were raped, tortured and killed. It’s near impossible to get closure for such historical trauma when (unlike, for example, in Germany) Japanese politicians have been reluctant to disavow their country’s war-time actions. For the same reason, resentment of Japan is still rife in South Korea and the Philippines.

The Chinese Communist Party is keen to foster this antagonism. After 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests, which the leadership decided stemmed from a lack of love for the homeland, the CCP embarked on a “patriotic education campaign.” Textbooks emphasized China’s past suffering under foreign aggressors and presented the CCP as a savior.

As China has grown in power and prestige, so has Chinese nationalism — but it is tinged with victimhood. “China can say no,” a 1990s bestseller declared. Some of my compatriots continued to see foreign bullies everywhere, bolstered by events such as the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. This kind of nationalism — a mix of self-pity and cultural arrogance — is intoxicating. Above all, it’s convenient for the CCP when it needs someone to blame.

Twice — in 2005 and 2012 — this has spilled into mass anti-Japanese demonstrations across dozens of Chinese cities, catalyzed by such issues as the prospect of Japan permanently joining the UN Security Council, or disputes over islands in the East China Sea.

Japanese shops were destroyed and consulates vandalized. The Beijing government turned a blind eye to much of this, though it risked becoming the target of nationalistic anger when riot police sought to quell the most extreme and violent of the protesters.

The atmosphere today isn’t as dramatic, but it may be more insidious. The racism that seems to be emerging is directed against diaspora Japanese, particularly children. The electronics company Panasonic is among several businesses allowing China-based employees to return home for a period, while expat schools have paid for extra security. Parents have even been asked to refrain from speaking Japanese in public.

Two madmen in a country of 1.4 billion are, of course, hardly representative. The vast majority of Chinese have reacted to the attacks with horror and sympathy. The Shenzhen school has been sent thousands of bouquets. Kuaishou, a TikTok-style video platform, announced it has shut down more than ninety accounts for disseminating anti-Japanese misinformation.

But the authorities have kept uncharacteristically silent about the attackers, though both men were arrested immediately after the stabbings. To what extent were the murderers influenced by the government’s spy hunt and the Japan-bashing over Fukushima? Had they bought into the anti-Japanese misinformation that is allowed to spread online?

Without transparency, such questions are impossible to answer and there can be no reckoning for violent Chinese nationalism and those who promote it. That’s exactly the point.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2024 World edition.