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WALL STREET JOURNAL
Why China Can’t Stop Hating Japan
Their toxic wars over history have
become caught up in both countries’ domestic politics By Richard
McGregor. Put yourself in the
shoes of a Chinese strategist, pondering ways to check and undermine the
dominant role that the U.S. has maintained in East Asia since the end of
World War II. Beijing has already
built a navy to challenge the U.S. on the oceans and established
military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea. As
President Donald Trump causes alarm among U.S. allies world-wide, China
is also trying to peel Asian neighbors like the Philippines away from
the U.S. and bring them into a new Sinocentric club. But Beijing has
never really tried the one move that could, at a stroke, devastate
American interests in the region and, by extension, the world:
disentangling Japan from its longtime security alliance with the U.S. If
China could reassure Japan about its security, Washington’s standing as
Asia’s superpower would be gravely diminished. Why, then, has
China so consistently radiated hostility toward Japan instead of trying
to seduce it? The conventional
explanation is that Beijing doesn’t dare reach out to Tokyo because the
Chinese remain collectively furious over Japan’s aggression and
atrocities during World War II and the country’s subsequent refusal to
apologize for them. But this view doesn’t hold up. For decades after
1945, China didn’t seek an official apology. Beijing changed its tune
only when it became more powerful from the 1980s onward and found a
source of strategic leverage in reminding Japan of its past crimes. More
to the point, since Beijing started demanding apologies for Tokyo’s
wartime behavior, Japan has repeatedly given them—but to little effect. The real obstacle
to a reconciliation between China and Japan lies in the way that their
toxic wars over history have become caught up in both countries’
domestic politics, exacerbating their natural rivalry as Asia’s two
great powers. In the early 1990s,
with China’s Communist Party seeking to rebuild its credentials after
the bloody 1989 crackdown on antigovernment demonstrators across the
country, Beijing sanctioned a relentless diet of anti-Japanese
propaganda. A besieged party eager to rally the masses saw no better
vehicle than reviving attacks on the “historical criminal,” Japan. Over time, policy
toward Japan has become so sensitive that any Chinese official who
advocates reconciliation risks career suicide. Chinese Foreign Minister
Wang Yi, who is also Beijing’s pre-eminent Japan expert, speaks Japanese
well—but he avoids doing so in public, lest he draw personal attacks. Chinese diplomats
and scholars know the dangers of advocating rapprochement with Tokyo.
“If you [say] any nice words about Japan, then you will get an angry
reaction from students,” said Chu Shulong of Tsinghua University.
Studying America is less fraught, he adds: “People might not agree with
me, but they never call you a traitor.” Of course,
sensitivities in Sino-Japanese relations run both ways. Japanese
conservatives, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have espoused
revisionist views on World War II that were bound to offend China and
South Korea. (Some conservatives say that the wartime government was
unfairly blamed for forcing “comfort women” into sexual servitude;
others deny that the 1937 Nanjing massacre ever happened.) Japanese
apologies for the war have invariably been undercut by defiant
politicians saying the country had nothing to apologize for. China experts in
Japan face pressure too. Diplomats in Japan’s “China School” held sway
over Tokyo’s policy until the mid-1990s; when relations went south, they
were labeled “panda huggers” and sidelined. Thus the world’s second- and
third-largest economies have lost the ability to talk to one another and
build a stable relationship. Leaders in Beijing
still use the idea of Japan as China’s enemy to rouse the citizenry. The
Japanese, seeing themselves depicted as China’s foe, have increasingly
begun to act like one. Until Asia’s great
powers can get along, Japan will want to keep U.S. troops in the region.
Japan cannot handle China on its own, and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal
only adds to Tokyo’s jitters. A U.S. drawdown would propel a nervous
Japan to go nuclear itself. Only then might China wake up to the cost of
its enduring hostility to Japan. —Mr. McGregor is
the author of “Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S.
Power in the Pacific Century,” just out from Viking. Appeared in the
September 9, 2017, print edition as 'China’s Self-Defeating Feud With
Japan.' |