Mao: the Communist revolution would never have succeeded

[Randy W]

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Are Japan and China really ancient enemies, or is this something much newer?

What if its those contemporary (and temporary) issues that are driving the war-of-words, with past conflict little more than an excuse?

 

That’s what Ian Buruma, a highly respected historian who focuses on Asia (and who wrote “Inventing Japan: 1853-1964,” a great book about modern Japan), argues in an essay for the Wall Street Journal. “On the surface, the dispute is about history,” Buruma writes. “In fact, it is more about politics, domestic and international, revealing the tangled relations in a region where history is frequently manipulated for political ends.”

 

. . .

 

When Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka visited Beijing in 1972 to restore Japan’s relations with China, a country that had been devastated by Japanese military aggression in the 1930s and ’40s, his host Mao Zedong allowed himself a moment of levity. Responding to Tanaka’s apology for what Japan had done during the war, Mao answered that there was absolutely no need to apologize. After all, he said, without the Japanese invasion, the Communist revolution would never have succeeded.

Secure in his nationalist credentials, as the leader who unified China, Mao could afford this little joke, which also happened to be the truth. Such a remark would be unimaginable for any of the technocrats who rule China today. Maoism can no longer justify the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, since few Chinese believe in any kind of Communism. Nationalism is now the dominant ideology, and the rulers have to prove their mettle, especially toward Japan. This need is particularly acute when a new leader takes power. The latest party boss, Xi Jinping, needs to show people, not least the military brass, that he is in charge.

 

 

[Fu Lai]

this guy pooh-poohs too much and the article makes me throw up a little... just saying

[Randy W]

Still, I would thinki these two points would be worth at least considering

 

In other words, because Chinese isn’t really Maoist or Marxist anymore, the country had to find a new ideology, a new way to legitimate the Communist Party’s rule. That ideology is nationalism, but nationalism requires an “other,” a foreign country to galvanize patriotism and against which to define national identity.

 

And the United States has played a role in all of this, using its post-war influence in Japan (we still have tens of thousands of troops there, and the U.S.-backed pacifist constitution leaves the country conveniently reliant on U.S. support) to “contain” China. Buruma writes, “Even when Japanese businessmen pressed for closer relations with China in 1970, the Japanese prime minister, Eisaku Sato, staved them off out of deference to the U.S. policy of containing China.”

 

And Japan has still not fully recovered its own national identity, which was once sternly nationalist but was outright destroyed when the country lost World War II. The country’s struggle to reinvent itself, ongoing for 60 years now, includes a major dilemma about whether or not Japan gets to be a real world power again.

 

 

Would there really be any other explanation for the destructive forces in the anti-Japan rioting?

 

And what can the outcome possibly be, other than a strengthened Japan?