The Chinese View of Japan is Defined by Politics

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In recent decades, anti-Japanese nationalism has grown into an important feature of Chinese popular discourse and at times caused serious strains in bilateral official relations.

Yet China’s view of its neighbour and sometimes adversary Japan, though embedded in longstanding attitudes, has nonetheless oscillated between sympathy and hatred over the decades. 

These shifts, argues Yinan He, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, have often been the result of changing domestic circumstances in China itself. 

This should come as no surprise. The late Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth, editor of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, outlined an approach to the study of ethnicity that focused on the ongoing negotiations of boundaries between groups of people.

Ethnic identity, he asserted, is maintained through relational processes of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, the group defines itself in opposition to an “other.”

However, defining Japan as this “other” has not been a constant in China. While China’s traumatic wars with Japan should have brought about constant anti-Japanese hatred over time, in the initial period after each major war with Japan, Chinese national identity was never primarily centered around animosity against Japan but against some other enemies.

Following China’s humiliating defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895, she writes, “modern Chinese nationalism burst forth, but a large segment of Chinese elite, especially Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionary comrades, embraced Meiji Japan as a model of modernization and source of aid for revolution.”

Instead, they focused on ridding the country of the Manchu ruling class, defined as non-Han ethnic foreigners.

Therefore, it was not coincidental that Sun Yat-sen, who would in 1911 lead the revolution to end imperial rule and create a Chinese republic, adopted the platform of driving out the Manchus to restore Chinese rule in 1894. 

Like many Chinese nationalists, he was also a pan-Asianist, advocating that all Asians, connected by common race and cultural heritage, should unite against Western imperialism. Chinese elites formed an image of Japan as a fraternal neighbour.

Only after the First World War, when Japan began to place humiliating demands on a weak Chinese state, was anti-Japanese fervour included in a rising tide of anti-imperials feeling, also directed against European powers.

What caused a great disillusion among Chinese nationalists about fraternity with Japan were the “21 Demands” raised by Japan in 1915, designed to give Japan regional ascendancy over China.

This was followed by the agreement between the victorious Western powers, in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to transfer defeated Germany’s concessions in China to Japan. 

Similarly, for several decades after the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 193-1932, and the second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, Chinese official historiography in the post-1949 People’s Republic had mainly highlighted the struggle between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Nationalist Party (KMT), and the foreign supporter of the KMT, the United States. 

This history did not demonize Japan, nor did it emphasize Chinese victimhood vis-à-vis Japan. According to Oxford University professor Rana Mitter, author of China’s War With Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, Chinese national identity in this period was actually anchored at the “defining fundamental fissure” between the Chinese Communists and the capitalists, rather than an ethnocentric nationalism directed at Japan.

In 1972, 27 years after the war, the two countries normalized their diplomatic relationship, and formed a loose strategic alignment targeted at the Soviet Union.

Anti-Japanese nationalism only began in the early 1980s, about ten years after the two countries had a normalized diplomatic relationship and had developed weighty economic ties and close societal contacts with one another.

Domestic Chinese politics was the main cause of the change. From the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms after the Cultural Revolution increased inflation, unemployment, corruption, and crime. 

Patriotism replaced the discredited Communist ideology of class struggle as the centrepiece of a new Chinese national identity, with Japan now singled out as the main cause of the nation’s decades of “national humiliation.”

Thus, the memory of past wars with Japan was resurrected and politicized. Knowing this, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held off from visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine for war dead in April. It honors 14 Japanese leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal as war criminals in 1948.

This was partly out of consideration of improving relations with China, as President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Japan when it hosts a G20 summit at the end of June.