China – Page 15 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Quick links following up on recent topics

Here’s a few links that I have laying around, mostly related to things that I’ve been discussing over the past week. I’m a little too tired and sick to offer any commentary right now, but feel free to leave your own.

The Daily Show’s comment on the anti-Japan protests in China, in streaming WMV. You know a story is big when the Daily show is making fun of it.

The Economist has a travelogue type article about life in a particular village in rural China.

Despite China’s increasing openness to prying foreign eyes, the dynamics of village life remain hidden away. Although the Chinese media report extensively on rural problems, foreign journalists require government approval to conduct interviews in the countryside (as indeed, in theory, they do for any off-base reporting in China).

In typical Chinese fashion, they only gave the reporter permission to visit one of the more prosperous rural villages, but that aside it’s still an interesting piece.

The Taipei Times is carrying an Associated Press report on how China is using the war on terrorism to supress the Uyghur’s Muslim lifestyle in western Xinjiang province.

Comparing the situation to Tibet, a report by the two groups said Muslims in the Xinjiang region are “concerned for their cultural survival” amid a government-financed influx of settlers from China’s Han ethnic majority.

ESWN translated a section of a very interesting article on how the Chinese government suppresses their own history. Amazingly the author of the article is in Beijing- I hope nothing bad happens to him.

When it comes to viewpoints about warfare and nationalism, the Chinese people are not better than the Japanese. “The winner becomes the emperor while the loser is just a bandit” is an age-old concept of warfare in China. The arrogance of the Han tribe about owning everything under heaven continues to live on today as nationalism. More particularly, the way in which the Chinese Communists have fabricated history and used lies to rule since seizing power is much worse than how the Japanese rightists are revising their history of invasion; the way in which the Chinese Communists have beautify their totalitarian rule is much worse than how the Japanese rightists have beautify militarism. The way by which the Chinese Communists have ruled with lies has created a basis by which Japan can revise its history in order to fool the new generation of Japanese.

This web site seems to be associated with the organization that created the controversial new textbook in Japan. They have a near endless supply of offensive articles written in Japanese, as well as a number in English so poor that they seem to have been translated by a computer. They also host a couple of articles contributed by a fellow with a Germanic sounding name, who manages to combine anti-Semetic and pro-Japanese Imperial sentiment.

The ancient Hebrews, however, have shown a propensity for mass enslavement and slaughter following victory. Since Jews have significant influence over U.S. military and foreign policy, perhaps some of these ancient lessons have been carried over into modern times. It would not be a stretch to suggest that American post-war policies may be an extension of the Jewish experience.

More rioting in China, this time not aimed at Japan

Reuters reported early this morning that rioting occured on Sunday in Huankantou village, Dongyang city, in Zhejiang province(just south of Shanghai).

More than 50 police were injured on Sunday and rushed to hospital, with five listed in critical condition, a doctor told Reuters. About four villagers were injured.

Police had tried to disperse about 200 elderly women who had kept a 24-hour vigil for two weeks at sheds and at a roadblock outside an industrial park housing about 13 chemical factories, villagers and local officials said by telephone.

Two of the women were killed, two villagers said. “They were run over by police cars,” one said.

A source with knowledge of the incident who requested anonymity said the two had died during an attempt to arrest them. He did not elaborate, but a statement from the city government denied that anyone had been run over and killed.

Thousands of villagers clashed with police in riot gear, overturned about 10 police cars and hurled rocks at officers holed up in a local high school, residents and officials said.

“Villagers knocked down the wall of the school and charged in,” one villager surnamed Wang said.

Residents also smashed the windows of about 50 buses which carried some 3,000 police, paramilitary police and security guards to the scene at about 3 a.m. on Sunday to try to disperse protesters, they said.

Some of their specific grievances included,

“We hate the people in command of the police. We are waiting for the government to respond,” a second villager said.

A third said: “We demand the provincial government send a team to investigate this case.”

Villagers told stories of withered trees and grass near the factories, inedible vegetables and undrinkable water.

“Give me back my land. Save my children and grandchildren,” read a banner hanging outside the industrial park.

Although this rioting occured on the same day as anti-Japanese riots in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities, it was triggerd by long standing grievances that the villagers had been peacefully protesting for some time. Perhaps the Chinese authorities decided that the dramatic anti-Japan protests in the city would provide sufficient cover for them to remove the demonstrating townsfolk?

Hong Kong based Asia Times reports that Beijing has imposed a domestic media blackout on the Japan protests, and speculates that:

Chinese leaders may fear, too, that continuous anti-Japan demonstrations could trigger protests about broader social grievances, speculated a university professor who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Just two months ago, Chinese communist leaders refused to let people come out and publicly commemorate the late Zhao Ziyang [the purged party leader who sympathized with the 1989 Tiananmen student demonstrators]. They know that wound is still fresh and could easily open,” the professor said. ‘. “They don’t want protests to turn against them.”

This is far from the first time that large scale rural protests have taken place in China. The Reuters article states that

More than 3 million people staged about 58,000 protests nationwide in 2003, according to the latest available official figures. The number of demonstrations jumped 15 percent from the previous year

This is also not the first time that such a protest has turned deadly and been reported in foreign media. Remember last year’s riots in Henan province in central China.

As many as 5,000 people fought with sticks and burned several houses over the weekend in violence between Hui Muslims and members of the Han ethnic majority, according to Langchenggang residents interviewed by phone.

The fighting killed seven people and injured 42, according to residents and the government. Langchenggang residents could not confirm a report by The New York Times of 148 deaths, including 18 police officers.

Authorities imposed martial law on the area in Zhongmou County near the city of Zhengzhou, residents said.

In a way, the simultaneous occurrance of these two very different protests speaks for the divide between the rich urban and poor rural areas in China. The city dwellers may have the luxury to protest atrocities that happened decades ago, but the bulk of the population in China seems to be more concerned with atrocities that their own government is committing against them every day.

Banned manga depicting Nanjing Massacre

This is a repost of an article from the Kyodo news service originally published on October 14th of last year.

Publisher pulls Nanjing Massacre manga after politicians protest
TOKYO — Major publisher Shueisha Inc said Wednesday it will suspend publication of a comic in a popular weekly manga magazine after Japanese local politicians claimed it “distorts history.”

Shueisha said it will not publish the comic “Kuni ga Moeru” (The Country is Burning) in the Oct 13 and Oct 28 editions of Weekly Young Jump, which is immensely popular with Japanese men.

“Some people say the photo used for reference in the drawing was fabricated. It was inappropriate to use such material,” a Shueisha representative said.

The comic series, authored by Hiroshi Motomiya, is a fictional tale about the life of a bureaucrat in the turbulent times of the early Showa era (1926-1989). It has been carried in the magazine since November 2002.

In the magazine’s Sept 16 and Sept 22 editions, the comic described Japanese soldiers massacring civilians in Nanjing in China, in reference to the Nanjing Massacre of 1937.

A group of 37 members of local assemblies protested to the publisher on Oct 5, saying the massacre was presented as if it were the truth in the form of manga and that it was deliberately distorting history by using a photo whose authenticity cannot be confirmed.

They said in a letter that there is strong evidence that the massacre never happened and no proof that it did.

“The parts related to the use of the fake photo as pointed out will be edited or deleted when the comic book is published,” Shueisha said in its reply to the complaint.

The Nanjing Massacre refers to atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army against civilians in Nanjing and its vicinity from December 1937 to January 1938.

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal concluded that more than 140,000 people were killed. Some Chinese historians put the death toll much higher at 300,000 in Nanjing alone. Japanese accounts vary from several thousand to 200,000 dead. (Kyodo News)

Here is a sample page from the original manga, chosen to show how graphically it actually depicts the Massacre. Do realize that this comes from the weekly manga magazine ‘Young Jump,’ whose primary audience is Jr Highschool boys-the same segment that the shitty rightwing textbook is supposed to be teaching.

The entire 20 or so pages can be found here.

I think that this backs up both of my points in my previous post; namely that firstly, the Japanese public at large is in fact exposed to and open to a range of viewpoints regarding history and are not opposed to the truth, and secondly that the ultra rightists, in their vocal attempts to stifle what the public sees, succeed in becoming the only voice picked up by international media. Still, it is most disturbing that there are a number ultra rightists who deny that the Nanjing Massacre ever took place. Of course their presence on the web is mainly in Japanese, but here is one example in English. Japanese readers may be interested in this detailed page trying to ‘prove’ that the photographs used in Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking are false. For the record, I find Nanjing Massacre-denyers about as credible as people who believe that we never actually landed on the moon. (To be clear, that means I don’t believe them.) It is very unfortunate that the Japanese public is willing to accept this kind of bullying by extremists.

What China doesn’t want you to see: the Japanese Embassy in China

Thanks to Mainichi:

20 broken windows, thrown water bottles, tomatoes, eggs, yakiimo, enough so that you can’t step without stepping on something.

In addition to the damage at the embassy, Japanese restaurants, businesses, even Japanese cars were attacked.

The Embassy released the pictures to the Japanese media after Chinese authorities banned foreign reporters from the Embassy area.

What Yasukuni says about the Nanjing Massacre, what most Japanese probably know

ESWN was kind enough to post a link to a gallery of photographs from the Yasukuni shrine as a comment on my earlier post on a Taiwanese Solidarity Union politician’s visit to the shrine.

Many of you will probably be most interested in the following picture from the adjoining museum, which contains Yasukuni’s explanation, in both Japanese and English, of the ‘Nanjing Incident,’ or as we usually know it, the ‘Nanjing Massacre.’

Since the image is a bit blurry and hard to read, I will reproduce the English below. And yes, the Japanese does say the same thing.

Nanking Operation

The purpose of the Nanking Operation was to surround the capital, thus discouraging the Chinese from waging war against the Japanese. Tang Thengzhi, commander-in-chief of the Nanking Defense Corps. ignored the Japanese warning to open the gates of the city. He ordered his troops to defend Nanking to the death and then escaped. Therefore, when the hostilities commenced, the leaderless Chinese troops either deserted or surrendered. Nanking fell on December 15.

Having seen what Yasukuni has to say about the ‘Nanjing Operation,’ let’s look at a more mainstream Japanese source. First I will post my translation the Kojien‘s entry on the Nanjing Massacre (南京大虐殺）. For those who don’t know, the Kojien is basically the most popular standard Japanese dictionary (that is, Japanese dictionary for Japanese readers, not to a foreign language), and probably the source that most Japanese would first turn to when looking up almost any term. Therefore it is arguably the most mainstream possible source.

Nanjing Massacre
In the Sino-Japanese war, about December of 1937, in and around the occupied city of Nanjing, the Japanese military massacred a large number of surrendered and captured Chinese soldiers, as well as civilians. Additionally there were incidents of such misconduct as arson, plunder, and rape.

I would also like to present the entry on the ‘Nanjing Incident’ （南京事件） from the 1970 edition of the Kadokawa Dictionary of Japanese History(角川日本史辞典). There are actually two sub-entried under ‘Nanjing Incident.’ The first refers to an incident in March of 1927 when the ‘People’s Revolutionary Army’ fired upon Japanese, British, and American troops. The second ‘Nanjing Incident’ is the one which we today generally call the ‘Nanjing Massacre.’ There is no entry for ‘Nanjing Massacre’ or any note that this is term is also used, but then for all I know the term was not yet in common use in 1970. If anyone knows one way or the other, clarification would be appreciated. Here is my translation of the Kadokawa Dictionary of Japanese History’s entry.

Nanjing Incident
1937(Showa 12). The plunder and ravaging that occured during the Japanese military’s occupation of Nanjing in the Sino-Japanese war. The Chinese army had already retreated before the Japanese entered the city, and the Japanese army went on a rampage that lasted until February of the following year, killing 42,000 Chinese, primarily women and children. Responsibility for this incident was severely pursued after the war by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East [Note: also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal]

The interpretation of history provided at Yasukuni is most definitely an extreme right wing position. I am not going to offer any of my own opinion or interpretation at the moment, but I will say this; having seen both the Yasukuni/right-wing perspective and two different examples of a mainstream, literal dictionary definition of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, it is interesting to see that they are not actually contradictory. Even the Yasukuni museum (at least in this single panel) does not deny that the Massacre took place; they simply ignore the issue. Is it actually likely that there are many people in Japan, even among the 0.3% of middle school students being taught with low quality textbooks drafted by right wing organizations, who are unaware of truth of the Nanjing Massacre?

Since ESWN’s helpfully donated link started this post, I’ll end with as an addendum with a quote from an article posted there just a day or two agotheir latest post:

There is a small number of ultra-rightists in Japan whose comments are magnified in the Asian media. I do not believe that they represent the mainstream Japanese opinion. Yet, the majority in Japan is either embarrassed, intimidated (as in: if you speak up, an ultra-rightist sound truck going to show up outside your home and/or workplace to harrass you 24 hours a day with diatribes of hatred) or too polite to say anything about these ultra-rightists so that the Asian nations now believe that those opinions are mainstream in Japan. This is why there are international crises. It is up the to the majority of the Japanese people to condemn those wayward opinions each and every time in a vociferous manner.

Is the problem really that the right-wingers are influencing popular opinion in Japan? Or are they as few as ever, but increasingly good at making their presence known in the international media? Is it true, as Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times seems to think, that Japan is slowly but surely drifting towards the right?

PS: Curzon over at Coming Anarchy just posted a piece about why he thinks Japan no longer needs to apologize for the crimes of their Imperial period. I’m more interested in what people actually think and know already than abstractions of what they ‘should’ do, but there is obviously a connection between one and the other.

Reaction to irrational protests begins

UPDATE: The Japan Times seems to be listing events as they are reported, so keep checking there.

Good wrapup by MSNBC

Shenzhen city protests

Thanks FG

Japan Olympic Committee wonders if China can handle the Olympics in 2008

China’s Foreign Minister says protests “not China’s fault”

Anti-Japanese UNSC Entry Protest Planned in front of UN Apr. 11

Japanese in China fear for their safety: “Hide the Japanese flag” they’re told.

Ishihara criticizes both governments: “China is just directing its internal strife at Japan… Japan is simply calling for calm and not expressing the Japanese people’s frustration to China”

China is said to have “banned journalists” from photographing the damage at the Japanese Embassy.

OK, that’s all. I have work to do.

China keeps it real… Real dumb

China’s protests and harassment of Japanese people and business owners continue to remind the world of Kristallnacht. This is receiving broad coverage, so I’ll just link to some of it:

Nichinichi
WP
Japan Today:

2 Japanese students beaten up at Shanghai restaurant

Two Japanese students were beaten at a restaurant in Shanghai on Saturday night and sustained injuries, the Japanese Consulate General in Shanghai said Sunday. The students were beaten with a beer mug and an ashtray by an unknown number of Chinese, consulate officials said.

Japan Times
Mainichi
NYT:
Continue reading China keeps it real… Real dumb

Italy allows Chen entry as president – or do they?

The Taipei Times today published an article leading with the incredible headline Italy allows Chen entry as president. The article states:

President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) departed for the Vatican yesterday afternoon to join 200 state and religious leaders paying a final tribute to Pope John Paul II.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said the Italian government pledged to grant Chen entry to the country in his capacity as head of state.

Chen’s attendance at the papal funeral today will mark the first time a president from Taiwan has visited the Holy See since the establishment of diplomatic ties 63 years ago.

The visit will also make Chen the first president from Taiwan to set foot in a European country.

Is this in fact entirely accurate?

Let’s have a look at the article the BBC published a day before the trip happened.

A Chinese spokesman expressed “strong dissatisfaction” at Italy for granting Mr Chen a visa to go to the Vatican.

Italy has diplomatic ties with Beijing, rather than Taiwan, which China sees as part of its territory.

And later on in the same article-

If Mr Chen goes ahead with his trip, he will become the first Taiwanese president to visit the Vatican – one of only 25 nations that officially recognises Taipei diplomatically, and the only one in Europe

He is scheduled to leave Taipei on Thursday for Rome, and stay in the Vatican until after Friday’s funeral.

In fact, the Taipei Times is making a very subtle, but highly misleading mis-statement. President Chen is being received by the Vatican as a head of state, but he is not, as the Taipei Times implies, being so received by Italy. From where does this confusion arrive?

To understand, let’s go to Zimbabwe for a moment. The NYT reported this morning that-

Zimbabwe’s president, Robert G. Mugabe, arrived in Rome on Thursday to attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral, apparently using a diplomatic loophole to evade European Union sanctions that ostensibly bar him from traveling to any of the union’s member states.

[…]

Under normal circumstances, Mr. Mugabe would not be permitted to fly to Rome. He is among 95 Zimbabweans whom the European Union has barred from entering its territory on the grounds that they “commit human rights violations and restrict freedom of opinion, association and peaceful protest.”

Mr. Mugabe appears to have evaded the travel ban because he is going to the Vatican, which is not a member of the European Union. A treaty obliges Italy to grant safe passage to visitors bound for the Vatican, which has no airport.

While I imagine that Chen is certainly not a criminal like Mugabe and has as much right as any Taiwanese citizen to visit European nations as a private citizen, the assertion that he is being received as a head of state by Italy is quite false. Italy is simply giving him landing permission as a head of state on a diplimatic visit to the Vatican, but this is based entirely on their treaty obligations to the Vatican, and in no way reflects their position towards Taiwan.

Taiwan is only formally recognized as a country by a few countries around the world, in Europe only by the Vatican. The Vatican’s reasons for maintaining relations with Taiwan over communist China are clear. Unlike the other nations of the world whose responsibilities are the economic and physical safety of their citizens, the Vatican’s primary concern is the spiritual guidance of Catholics around the world. China, despite what they claim, does not allow freedom of religion, forcing Catholics to choose between either a state organized Catholic church, which was forced to cut ties to the Vatican so long ago that they still conduct Mass in Latin, or pray in secret, at risk of prosecution by Chinese authorities.

In the flurry of news related to the Pope’s funeral The New York Times also has an article on this topic. As they say,

China’s 12 million Catholics are mourning the death of John Paul II, but his passing is also a reminder of an unfinished legacy: the division of Chinese Catholics from the rest of the church, and from each other. Indeed, if John Paul II helped bring down Communism in Eastern Europe, the Communist Party that rules China proved resilient. The two sides never came to agree to normalize relations between the Vatican and China and end the diplomatic break that began more than a half century ago under Mao.

On a personal level, the pope never achieved his goal of visiting China.

Of significant interest is that fact that a Chinese spokesman for the laughably named ‘Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association’ is quoted in the BBC article above as saying “The decision to let Chen Shui-bian attend has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, including five million Catholics.” Clearly the Vatican holds the combined interests of the 7 million hidden Catholics in China, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Catholics in Taiwan, are also worth looking out for.

Anti-eachother propaganda in China and Japan?

I was writing a response to Jing’s much appreciatedcomment on my previous post and it began to meander enough so I thought I would post on the front page instead. For full background, read the original article, and the response to it on the excellent ESWN blog.
[Note: I posted the wrong link at first, I apologize, it has been corrected.]

Very interesting. I generally look at ESWN once in a while, but I hadn’t caught this article yet. Based on what he writes at ESWN (and based on what I’ve read there in the past I have pretty good faith in what he writes) the Japan Times article (actually a translated Kyodo piece, I think it’s worth noting) is either deliberately misleading or very factually misinformed (I would wager on a combination).

I would still like to know more about what the books say. For example, does he only visit the most extreme rightist institutions in Japan, or does he also explain how in reality these views are an extreme minority position these days? Were these books even banned for their own sake or was it really something else he did?

Whatever the case, it is still an obvious fact that anti-Japanese sentiment is encouraged by the Chinese government. When I was traveling in China I don’t believe I met a single native person who didn’t cringe a little bit when I mentioned that I studied Japanese, and when asked they all admitted to “hating Japan.” I remember a conversation with one Chinese man working at a youth hostel where I stayed, and after talking for a while and admitting that he got along very well with almost all of the Japanese guests there and has no dislike them on an individual basis, he still hated the country for some unarticulatable reason.

This attitude is common throughout the country, and clearly a result of education and media and not personal conclusions, because people only ever learn one side of the story. I will gladly admit that there is some level of this in Japan as well, but not nearly to the same degree. For example, Japanese textbooks may inappropriately gloss over attrocities comitted in the past by the Japanese, but they do not teach outright hatred of modern China the same way that the Chinese seem to be taught to hate Japan.

Certainly the museum at Yasukuni shrine exhibits some reprehensible attitudes, but there are right-wing nutcases in every country. (excepting a few like, say, China where the nutcases universally call themselves left-wing instead for obvious reasons) There is anti-Japan sentiment in China, and anti-China sentiment in Japan, but the former case seems to have far more encouragement from the government and the media (which is of course all controlled by the government to some degree), and therefore far more of a majority opinion. I am also not saying that there is not enourmous racism in Japan, but it tends to be more universalist in nature (uck, that almost sounds positive!), and not the result of a longterm propaganda campaign against a specific political enemy.

ESWN writes that “Yu Jie as an example of a public intellectual pressuring the Chinese government to become more forceful against the revival of Japanese militarism.” I have no argument at all with working to prevent the revival of Japanese militarism, but China (and North Korea) have a decades old policy of using that as an excuse to maintain Japan as a potential threat to continue to justify their long-corrupted revolutionary demagogy, to fan the flames of their own nationalism.

As a footnote, all of the Uyghur I spoke to in the far west province of Xinjiang had very different attitudes. While they probably learn about the evils of WW2 just like any other student in the country, they seemed to be of the universal opinion that hating the Chinese for what they are still doing to to the Uyghur up this very day is a far more pressing issue. The professional guides who tend to receive a lot of Japanese tourists in Turpan all agreed that the portrayal of modern Japan in the Chinese media was quite unfair, and also said that they found the tourists from Japan far more agreeable than the domestic ones, who are often blatantly rude and racist to the local Uyghur people. (One of them, who spoke fluent Japanese and no English, mentioned he was particularly fond of young, single Japanese women, but this is another matter entirely, which would probably receive rather more popular support from the average Chinese man on the street.)

China yanks books about ties with Japan

Continuing along the lines of my recent posts, I present the following article from today’s Japan Times.

Two books on Sino-Japanese history and modern political relations have been pulled from shelves in China for undisclosed reasons, after selling about 50,000 copies apiece.

“Ambiguity’s Neighborhood” and “Iron and Plough,” both by author Yu Jie, disappeared from major bookstores in late December after four months of normal circulation, Yu said this week.

In the runup to the annual National People’s Congress plenary session that began March 5, independent booksellers were also told to stop selling it, Yu’s Beijing distributor said Wednesday.

Yu, 32, argues in “Ambiguity’s Neighborhood” that Chinese should learn more about modern Japan before saying they “hate” the people — common parlance for today’s younger generation influenced by anti-Japan media reports and school texts that discuss Japan’s 1931-1945 conquest of China.

“The two countries are so close, so this hate, this lack of understanding, doesn’t help at all,” Yu said, citing “arrogance” for the lack of more understanding. “Chinese people should understand the situation before they criticize it.”

Clearly there are some people in mainland China, who like many in Taiwan are willing to believe that the sins of the dead do not dictate the the actions of the living. Unfortunately, this seems to be considered dissent requiring punishment. Please read the remaining two-thirds of the article on the original site.

Now I have to run off in a few minutes to meet Curzon and Debito for dinner in Newark.