Unrest that riles Tokyo and worries Beijing

Apr 20th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Beijing and Tokyo remain at loggerheads after a third weekend of anti-Japanese protests in cities across China. The Chinese authorities seem reluctant to quell the unrest, but they are also worried that the outpouring of nationalist feeling will prove hard to handle

“IT’S a scary country,” Japan’s trade minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, said of China last week, following demonstrations in several Chinese cities by thousands of protesters, some of whom smashed the windows of Japanese shops and restaurants and threw stones at Japanese diplomatic buildings. For all their seeming reluctance to quell the unrest, Chinese leaders probably find it scary too.

The protests first turned violent in the south-western city of Chengdu on April 2nd, and erupted with particular fury in Beijing a week later. They were the biggest to take place in China since tens of thousands took to the streets across the country in 1999 in response to the bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy by American aircraft during the Kosovo war. Those protests, initially condoned by the authorities, fizzled out after three or four days, when the government made it clear that enough was enough. This time the government has appeared more hesitant.

Indeed, there were further disturbances on the weekend of April 16th-17th, with protests staged in at least ten Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Xiamen and Guangzhou. In the biggest of these, a crowd estimated at 20,000 attacked the Japanese consulate in Shanghai with stones and bottles. The latest wave of unrest came during a visit to China by Japan’s foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura. Fence-mending was not on the agenda: Mr Machimura sought an apology for the anti-Japanese violence but was rebuffed by his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, who insisted that China had nothing to say sorry for.

In a country where public protest is usually quickly suppressed, anti-Japanese sentiment has proved hard for the authorities to handle. The ruling communist party bases its legitimacy in part on its (somewhat overstated) record of fighting Japanese occupation forces in the 1930s and 1940s. It traces its intellectual origins to a movement inspired by anti-Japanese protests in 1919. Animosity towards Japan is regarded as the hallmark of a patriot.

The authorities’ dilemma is reflected in their handling of these protests, which began as a show of opposition (on the grounds that Japan has failed to show sufficient contrition for its wartime atrocities) to Japan’s campaign for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. They were fuelled by a decision by Japan’s education ministry to approve a school textbook (unlikely to be widely adopted) that plays down the extent of the atrocities. Chinese officials expressed outrage at the book, but quietly banned coverage of the protests in the Chinese-language media. Calls for a boycott of Japanese goods, widely circulated on the internet, also went unreported in the state-controlled press.

In Beijing, the authorities mobilised thousands of police and paramilitary troops to guard the Japanese embassy and ambassador’s residence, and to patrol the route of the march. Yet the security forces took no action as protesters threw stones and plastic bottles at the diplomatic buildings and overturned a car. Activists said the protests were unauthorised. In China, this makes them illegal. Yet no arrests were reported in connection with the Beijing protests. And not until April 19th did the authorities order the protests to stop. A foreign-ministry spokesman said that it was up to Japan to “reflect carefully” on the situation.

Chinese officials are doubtless thinking carefully too. Last week, Japan said it would soon allow Japanese gas companies to explore in an area of the East China Sea claimed by both countries, a move that has further riled Chinese nationalists. And the year is replete with potential flashpoints: May 4th (the anniversary of the 1919 protests), July 7th (Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937), the 60th anniversary on August 15th of Japan’s surrender, and September 18th (the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931).

This week, another front opened up in the dispute when Tokyo's High Court rejected an appeal for compensation by Chinese survivors of biological-warfare experiments conducted by Japan during the second world war. China's state media responded by calling for the site where the experiments took place to be given UN World Heritage status. Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary-general, called on the two sides to patch up their differences at a summit of Asian and African leaders this week.

China’s government worries that if it is seen as too weak towards Japan, or cracks down too hard, the protesters could turn against the party. In the last century, pro-democracy unrest in China was often closely linked with patriotic demonstrations. Many participants in the recent protests have been university students, a group kept under particularly close watch by the authorities since the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The internet and mobile phones have enabled rapid mobilisation (organisers say more than 20m people have signed an electronic petition against Japan’s UN bid). The nationalist genie, once unbottled, could prove hard for China to restrain.

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