Jiayou!

This morning's NYTimes article about anti-Japanese sentiment following the final of the Asian Football/Soccer Championship is quite amusing in its wondering naivete. Shorter article: "How can Chinese youths see the Asian Cup final as a nationalistic contest against Japan? They weren't even alive in WWII - why do they hate Japan so much??" Jim Yardley should know better than to actually believe something so silly, so I can only guess that this was how he was instructed to frame it for the poor souls back home.

First off, the fact that the younger generation of Chinese are not too friendly towards Japan shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has ever spent any time in China. The Japanese are routinely referred to as demons or ghosts - I'm not sure how to translate the terms, but it's the equivalent of casually referring to Arabs as "rag-heads" in day to day conversation and even in mainstream newspaper articles. Anniversaries of the rape of Nanjing and other WWII atrocities are routinely celebrated, with demands made of the Japanese government to apologize (some more) or pay reparations to surviving victims. History textbooks read like 1940's propaganda examples, and prime every generation of Chinese students to be increasingly sensitive to any form of Japanese assertion of power.

All this results in laughable grandstanding over godforsaken rocks in the middle of the South China Sea, and even over advertisements: at the beginning of this year an ad for a (Japanese) Toyota SUV was released in China, showing the car sitting on a very pretty bridge with 3,000 stone lions on it that the Japanese just happened to have used when they surrounded and marched into Beijing nearly 70 years ago. Outraged Chinese with too much time on their hands kicked up a huge fuss about how the Japanese were trying to "subliminally conquer" the Chinese people with the ad (ignoring the fact that it was a Chinese ad company that created the image). The whole situation bears more than a passing resemblance to the right-wing protests against Subway in Germany, so amusingly chronicled by Sadly, No!

Many people in China also think, rightly or wrongly, that Japan is doing much better than China economically (even when Japanese banks were defaulting all over the place), and will quickly express their puzzlement and frustration with what they perceive the situation to be. The conventional wisdom is that foreign governments are favouring Japan over China and thus contributing to an imbalance of economic power in the region. (Needless to say the exact same sentiment, reversed, is often expressed by the Japanese).

So of course, when you take a country that has the erratic touchiness of a bad-tempered cat, the soccer madness of South America, a long standing hostile relationship with a neighbor and buckets of self-aggrandizing nationalism whipped up by a state-owned media, the result is naturally not going to be pretty when the two countries meet in the Asian Cup final on home ground for the Chinese. The fact that anyone thought this was a good idea is astounding, and it's a tribute to mail-fisted Chinese totalitarian security methods that no one was killed.

Comments

[praktike]

great post.

Am I the only one, btw, who has noticed that the NYT really doesn't care about human rights in China anymore? What's up with that? They used to beat on China, like, every day! I took it upon myself to get all bent out of shape about the Times' non-coverage of the Uighers and the Tibetans in the fall, but to little avail. Now it's all about the benjamins.

[T: Central]

Welcome back, Z-Dub.

Thanks for the link to a very weak article.

First of all, the author cites no evidence that the anti-Japanese sentiment has actually increased. Second, the author doesn't even identify some sort of baseline from which increased enmity might be alleged!

It's like saying "Unemployment has become a more serious problem of late. Just look how miserable this unemployed dude is. Thank you very much."

[Zoe]

I swear, I have the funniest readers in the world. First that pirate joke from praktike, and now you, TCentral.

I had a wonderful weekend - anyone who lives in the northeast and is really nice to me might be able to come up and go swimming sometime :-)

[Cliu]

Nationalism is always encouraged when all other forms of political expression is squelched. It's really disturbing and yes, like praktike writes, all about the benjamins. So you have this incredibly repressive government with all these greedy frustrated people chasing the good life and we (I am Chinese-American) are about to become the world's economic powerhouse. For the greater cause of democracy, I am rather dismayed, because I think the sentiment of a good part of people who have made it in China is -- you see we made without political reform!

I heard recently from friends and relatives who have travelled there that the Chinese have lost all respect for America -- this is very interesting, and very scary, because in a sense, they've been kept in check...

I'm going myself soon, and I'll be spending the year in Taiwan, so I'll keep you posted.