. . .Fifteen years after the youthful activism of Tiananmen Square, a new breed of young Chinese agitators is finding its voice. Its mantra, though, is not democracy but the promotion of Chinese nationalism. Well-educated and united by the Internet, today's activists want China to flex its muscle against any foreign power they feel is holding back their resurgent nation. . .
. . .China's leaders clamp down on most forms of political expression, but in the past few years they have given anti-Japanese rabble-rousers a relatively long leash. "The [central] government understands that people today want a way to express themselves, and nationalism is a good safety valve," says Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Shanghai's Fudan University. . .
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At first glance, all this is very odd. Why haven't China's young professionals, grooving to Japanese pop and tapping on Toshiba notebook computers, shed the country's anti-Japanese reflexes as easily as they have discarded socialism for capitalism? Somehow, these twenty- and thirtysomethings seem to share a collective memory of Japanese occupation that is intensely vivid—even though they never experienced any of the outrages firsthand like their grandparents may have done. In part, the fervor directed against Japan is the creature of official dogma—a deliberate attempt by the authorities to replace socialism as a guiding ideology with nationalism. After 1989, when the Tiananmen massacre exposed the fissures in an increasingly restive society, the Ministry of Education increased the classroom intake of what it calls "patriotic education," much of which focuses on the terrible things Japan did during the war. Nothing is mentioned about how Japan contributes about $1 billion in direct assistance to China annually—in effect, a form of war reparation—or that the Beijing and Wuhan airports were built with Japanese aid. "Our history education is focused on teaching hate," says Ge Hongbing, a Shanghai-based novelist who addresses how nationalism has affected the country's youth in his writing. "All that hate is directed outward toward foreigners, especially the Japanese."
One junior high school textbook put out by the Shanghai Education Publishing House, for instance, devotes 28 pages to the "Anti-Japanese War," as World War II is called in China, while fewer than two pages are spent teaching students about the Cultural Revolution, which had sent the nation into a decade of chaos. Epic disasters like the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in a famine that killed some 20 million Chinese, are summed up merely as "a waste in agriculture and industry." Little wonder, then, that teenagers at a ceremony earlier this year in Shanghai honoring Chinese who died in the war had a skewed sense of history. "Many Chinese were killed by the Japanese," said Chen Tingting, a cheerful 14-year-old. "But during the Cultural Revolution, only a few cultural people died."
The lessons taught in school are reinforced by the state media, which sometimes amplify perceived Japanese slights against the Chinese in a sort of echo chamber of national grievance.
This summer, for example, when the Chinese publisher of a Chinese-Japanese dictionary discovered that the Japanese section changed the Chinese description of "Japanese invasion" to "Japanese occupation" and "Japanese imperialists" to "Japanese forces," it made front-page news. The state-run China Daily opined: "The dictionary incident is the latest proof some in Japan have never ceased their attempts to whitewash their country's nefarious deeds of the past." Last week, even as Japan lodged a formal complaint over a Chinese submarine's entering Japanese waters and demanded further explanation, this naval incident was kept out of official Chinese newspapers altogether.
As ever, the Internet has helped the voices of young Chinese nationalists gain a new cohesion. On the People.com.cn forum site, run by the state-run People's Daily, the discussion group dedicated to Sino-Japanese relations is second in popularity only to forums on friendships and relationships. From January through August, the China Patriots' Alliance website received 75,000 hits a day. Idealists who hoped that a technologically literate urban Chinese population would nurture democracy are nowadays contemplating a future where the running is made by young nationalists instead. "As China transforms rapidly, people are beginning to have many societal concerns," says Liu Xiaobiao, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. "But nationalism is the only channel they can use to vent their anger, so even people who may not have originally cared about patriotism have joined the movement."
By giving nationalists space to congregate and agitate, however, Beijing may be stirring up trouble for itself. The extremist patriotism preached by many young Chinese activists runs counter to the nation's increasingly internationalist foreign policy, which aims for China to be a full-fledged member of the global community. China has joined the World Trade Organization and is hosting the six-party North Korea talks, alongside Japan. Incidents like that at the Asian Cup soccer final between China and Japan in Beijing in August do China's reputation little good. Despite a 6,000-strong police presence, Chinese hooligans threw bottles at Japanese fans, burned Japanese flags and vandalized a Japanese diplomat's car. . .
The Time, November 22, 2004
