Restless Empire (58 page)

Another part of the answer is about risk. The Chinese leaders simply believe that North Korea and its nuclear weapons are much more controllable if there is a close relationship with China than if there is not. A third part of the answer is linked to China’s strategic rivalry with the United States in the region. The PRC leaders are afraid that if North Korea were to go, they would find a reunified Korea under US tutelage. And finally the answer is connected to discussions about the future influence of China in whatever settlement is reached on the Korean peninsula. We will look more closely at this question in the next chapter. But to understand China’s position on Korea it is essential to see that both the past and the future weigh heavily on the present and prevent China from solving its main foreign policy problem.

Meanwhile, since about 2007 China’s relationship with South Korea has started to deteriorate. Today an increasing number of young South Koreans find it difficult to remain friendly toward China as long as Beijing props up an aggressive dictatorship in the north of the country. As the South Korean electorate swung to the right in 2008, choosing a more hard-line president, some of the relationship with China—painstakingly built by both sides over almost two decades—seemed to be in freefall. Even controversies about ancient history have come into play. South Korean academics accused China of portraying the Kogury
ŏ
kingdom from two thousand years ago as Chinese, although for most Koreans it is the foundation state of the Korean nation. More than a few politicians, including some who had been close to the Chinese in the past, began fearing that the Kogury
ŏ
controversy was a signal that China intended to preserve North Korea as a Chinese vassal state whatever Seoul said or did.
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Whatever happens next in North Korea, Chinese
leaders will have a real task on their hands in convincing the South Korean public that China stands on their side in their wish to reunify their country.

A
S WE HAVE SEEN
throughout this book, China and Japan have had a complicated and unsettled relationship for most of the past 150 years, sometimes close, sometimes in violent conflict. There has always been a formalistic or even ritualistic quality to their mutual affairs, based on Chinese suspicions that Japan’s real aim has been and still is to replace China as the central power in the region. This, most Chinese feel, would be against the nature of things. In spite of their strong admiration for Japanese capabilities and skills, Japan to them remains a peripheral island kingdom, which ought never to aspire to take China’s place. The normative aspect is very important here. Increasingly the Sino-Japanese relationship has become more about who is right or wrong (or who are using the correct terms), than about the potential for cooperation and mutual benefit. There is something rather Confucian in this, in a quite negative sense, and it has left both countries looking diplomatically helpless. The only power to benefit in a strategic sense is the United States, which can use Chinese and Japanese fear of each other to its own advantage. Despite the ongoing controversies, however, the dealings between the two have been more stable over the past generation than they have been at any other time since the mid-nineteenth century, and both sides are at present benefiting from significant economic and technological exchange.

The new relationship between China and Japan began in 1971, after what the Japanese press referred to as the
Nikuson Shokku
, or Nixon shocks. First there was the US decision to open a dialogue with Beijing. And then Washington rushed to implement a more self-centered economic policy to deal with its balance-of-payment problems. The Japanese government had not been told beforehand of either of these decisions, and their effects hit the country hard—the first one in foreign policy
and the second in exports. The new Japanese prime minister, Tanaka Kakuei—a tough-minded nationalist from the Liberal Democratic Party’s right wing, who had long wanted less Japanese dependence on the United States—seized the opportunity. He began his own negotiations with Beijing, resulting in a 1972 joint communiqué between the two countries. In it, the Chinese side got almost all it wanted: diplomatic recognition, acceptance of Taiwan as part of China, and a clause that committed both sides to work against “efforts by any other country or group of countries” to establish “hegemony” in Asia—the latter obviously aimed at the Soviet Union, but with an implicit warning to the United States as well. Japan, on its side, got an opening to the China market, slowly to begin with, but increasingly intense after the reform era began in China in the late 1970s.

The decade of the 1980s was the golden age of Sino-Japanese collaboration. It was in many ways similar to the first decade of the century, when people on both sides of the East China Sea saw immense opportunities in cooperation. In the 1980s, trade increased significantly, with Japanese technology being easily and freely imported into China. Travel and exchanges of all sorts picked up, and in intellectual terms the trend from three generations before was continued. Soon the largest number of foreign students in Japan was Chinese. Today the Chinese student population accounts for two-thirds of all foreign students in Japan. In the 1980s seventy percent of all Japanese felt an affinity to China, far more than for any other nation. The positive emotional impact of normalization was strong in both countries, but probably stronger in Japan. Japanese opinion polls showed that a large majority hoped that the two countries could put the past aside and start over again as friends and partners. Both governments managed public views on their new relationship very closely. The CCP did not allow any anti-Japanese protest in China, and the Japanese authorities made sure that newspapers carried only positive stories about China.

It was a make-believe relationship that could only be set up for a fall. In the 1990s economic interaction continued to grow, but it was
not accompanied by a growth in the sense of community. Quite the contrary: By the end of the decade citizens of both sides felt considerably more negative about the other than they had done ten years earlier. First, the Japanese reaction to the 1989 events in China was strong. (It was difficult, however, to tell whether Japanese in China reacted more strongly to government suppression or simply to “disorder” in general.) The number of Japanese who saw China as a potential threat shot up. On the Chinese side, as access to the public sphere increased, more negative views about Japan came to the fore, most of them centering on history. Japan had never publicly apologized for its occupation of China, or paid proper compensation, some people wrote, and the atrocities Japanese soldiers had committed during the war had not been properly exposed. Interestingly, more of these views were held by young Chinese, who had not experienced the war, than by those who had. Both governments moved away from managing the relationship toward exploiting its negative aspects for their own advantage. When the CCP needed to focus attention away from its own shortcomings, it allowed public criticism of Japan. When a Japanese government needed support for unpopular initiatives at home or abroad, it appealed to Japanese concepts of uniqueness and willingness to sacrifice, sometimes symbolized by a prime ministerial visit to the Yasukuni shrine, where vast numbers of fallen Japanese soldiers are commemorated alongside fourteen convicted war criminals. The era of “historical issues” in the Sino-Japanese relationship had started in earnest. In the decade that followed, concentration on such disputes threatened to derail a relationship that the previous generation had so painstakingly built.

No issue that has done more damage to Sino-Japanese relations over the past ten years than how history is taught in schools. The truth is that history books used in Japan’s schools are uncertain or dishonest in portraying World War II and its causes, including Japan’s atrocities against civilians during the occupation of China. School history books in the PRC are terrible for all of the modern period, serving a mishmash of nationalist-infused lies in order to please what is seen as government
policy. A Chinese historian and philosopher, Yuan Weishi, pointed out in 2006 that in Chinese history books “if there is a conflict between China and others, then China must be right; patriotism means opposing other powers and foreigners. In the selection and presentation of historical materials, we will only use those that favor China whether they are authentic or not.”
⁵
Chinese textbooks still talk about sneaky missionaries, patriotic Boxers, and Japan’s permanent expansionism helped by cowardly GMD leaders. For post-1949 history it gets worse. The death toll of Mao’s campaigns is never mentioned. Nor are the effects of the Great Leap Forward. According to these textbooks, China broke with the Soviets for patriotic reasons only and the Cultural Revolution was the result of a set of misunderstandings combined with the deranged ambition of a woman, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. In Chinese school textbooks the Korean War is painted in black and white. In a chapter entitled “Resisting America, Supporting Korea, Protecting the Homeland and Defending the Country,” the best-selling history textbook for Chinese high schools gives the following account:

Not long after the founding of New China, the country faced the threat of external invasion. In the summer of 1950 the Korean Civil War erupted. The United States rushed to use military force to interfere in Korean internal matters, forming an American dominated “Allied Army” to invade Korea. They crossed the 38th Parallel and took the flames of war right up to China’s border. At the same time, the US 7th Pacific Fleet entered the Taiwan Straits and so interfered in China’s internal affairs. The situation in Korea was grave and imperiled China’s security and safety. . . . Faced with such a dire situation, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea requested that the Chinese government send troops to their aid. On October 10, 1950, in order to resist America, support Korea, and to protect and defend the country, a Chinese volunteer army under the leadership of Peng Dehuai entered Korea. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the Chinese volunteers and the Korean army and people beat back the American invaders, pushing them past the
38th Parallel, after which a stalemate ensued between China/Korea and the American invaders. Due to fierce resistance by the Chinese and Koreans, in the summer of 1953 the United States had no choice but to sign the armistice. With their defeat of the American army and victory in the War to Resist America and Support Korea, the Chinese Volunteer Army disbanded triumphantly.
⁶

Likewise, Japanese textbooks do a great disservice to the country’s young people by lying about its attacks on and occupation of China and other Asian countries in the twentieth century. The attempts to diminish and qualify the suffering of the people of Nanjing in 1937 are particularly galling. According to one textbook, published in 2005, “At this time, many Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded by Japanese troops (the Nanking [Nanjing] Incident). Documentary evidence has raised doubts about the actual number of victims claimed by the incident. The debate continues even today.”
⁷
The book also portrays the attack on Pearl Harbor as the result, rather than the cause, of war. It documents moments where Japanese troops were seen as liberators in Southeast Asia but has no similar texts on Japanese atrocities. These nationalist textbooks, and the controversy that surrounds them, keep mobilizing young people for antiforeign movements, especially in China, where many youngsters are only too eager to spot the mote that is in Japan’s eye, rather than the beam that is in their own country’s.

Alongside textbook controversies come clashes over territory and over redress for wartime mistreatment. The disagreement over the dividing line in the East China Sea became more acute when in the early 2000s Chinese companies began drilling for gas in the disputed areas. The Diaoyu/Senkaku islands at the center of the dispute are claimed by both countries, though historically China has the stronger claim. With regard to redress, since 1995 Chinese have been suing the Tokyo government and companies in Japanese courts for compensation arising from wartime crimes. These cases have been big news in both countries.
Chinese papers claim that the processes are moving too slowly. Japanese papers criticize the size of the compensation demands, even in cases where Japanese courts have agreed with the plaintiffs. So far the courts have awarded the plaintiffs more than 800 million yen.
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The irony is, of course, that Chinese citizens are still unable to take their own government (not to mention the CCP) to court, and that nobody has issued an apology for the millions killed in the CCP’s atrocities in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead nationalists in both countries use cases that involve citizens from the other country to prove the continuing evil intent of the opposing side.

The lack of imagination in Sino-Japanese relations has cost both countries dearly, and is likely to continue to do so in the future. What is striking in the relationship today is the complete failure of strategic vision on both sides. Leaders in Beijing and Tokyo
know
that they have nothing to gain from further demonizing the other. In fact, each is increasingly dependent on the other to succeed: China in its great power ambitions and Japan in its need to overcome economic stagnation. But nobody has so far been able or willing to give the relationship the priority it must have by putting the past to rest.

A
S
C
HINA BEGAN EMERGING
from years of isolation, its leader, Deng Xiaoping, focused on forging closer links with Southeast Asia. That region is full of not only Chinese migrants who have done well but also companies and individuals who could contribute to China’s modernization through trade and investment. Deng thought their involvement in the PRC would be less politically problematic than that of Americans, Japanese, and Koreans. The problem China faced was that most Southeast Asian states had leaders who saw China as a threat. They feared the political influence of the Chinese minorities in their own countries. And they resented the PRC because for almost a generation it had sponsored Communist parties opposed to their governments. In countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, and the Philippines,
China had supplied Communist-led guerrillas with money, weapons, and training to carry on civil wars. It was not an ideal starting point for opening up relations with the existing regimes.