April 28, 2005

China's Selective Memory

By PU ZHIQIANG

EVER since June 4, 1989, when the world's cameras embarrassed the Chinese government by recording the slaughter of unarmed protesters in Beijing, spring has been a sensitive period in Chinese politics. Public demonstrations of all kinds have been repressed as if they were vicious cancers. It is indeed news, then, that people have been protesting in the streets of Chinese cities about Japan's wartime past, its textbooks' reluctance to face history squarely, and its proposed accession to the United Nations Security Council.

Of course, the fundamental nature of these protests is different from that of the demonstrations of 1989, because they so far have had the tacit approval of the authorities. The protesters have incurred essentially zero risk, and suspense over the outcome has also been near zero. But even when protests are government-sanctioned, they still offer the Chinese people a rare chance to let off some steam.

If truth be told, however, China and Japan have much in common. China shares many of Japan's flaws and has yet to master some of its important strengths.

We Chinese are outraged by Japan's World War II crimes - the forcing of Chinese into sexual slavery as "comfort women," the 1937 massacre of unarmed civilians in Nanking, and the experiments in biological warfare. Our indignation redoubles when the Japanese distort or paper over this record in their museums and their textbooks. But if we look honestly at ourselves - at the massacres and invasions strewn through Chinese history, or just at the suppression of protesters in recent times - and if we compare the behavior of the Japanese military with that of our own soldiers, there is not much to distinguish China from Japan.

This comparison haunts me. When I think of the forced labor in Japanese prison camps, I am reminded of forced labor camps in China, and also of the Chinese miners who lose their lives when forced to re-enter mines that everyone knows are unsafe. Are the rights of China's poor today really so much better protected than those of the wretched "colonized slaves" during the Japanese occupation? There was the Nanking massacre, but was not the murder of unarmed citizens in Beijing 16 years ago also a massacre? Is Japan's clumsy effort to cover up history in its textbooks any worse than the gaping omissions and biased blather in Chinese textbooks?

China's textbooks omit the story of how the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950's was actually the disastrous failure of a harebrained economic scheme by Mao that led to the starvation of 20 million to 50 million rural Chinese. No one really knows the numbers. Nor do we know how many were killed in the campaigns to suppress "counterrevolutionaries" during the 1950's, in the Cultural Revolution during the 1960's, or even in the Beijing massacre of 1989. Yet we hold Japan firmly responsible for 300,000 deaths at Nanking. Does our confidence with numbers depend on who did the killing?

China and Japan both have blood on their hands, but they have important differences as well. Comfort women and others whom Japan has injured or insulted can sue either Japan's government or its big companies, and they can do this in either Japanese or Chinese courts. Japanese who want to can demonstrate in Tokyo shouting "Down with Japanese militarism!"

These things are very different in China. The Chinese government decides on its own whether to give modest compensation to the widows of dead miners. Ordinary workers and farmers are often in the position of issuing appeals to the very people who are oppressing them. Families of Beijing massacre victims to this day have police stationed at their doorways, lest they misbehave. And demonstrators may shout only about approved topics. Before we in China decide we are superior to Japan, we must address our own double standards.

Pu Zhiqiang is a Chinese lawyer. This article was translated by Perry Link from the Chinese.

Posted by TAC at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2005

State-Run Chinese Paper Lashes Anti-Japan Protests as 'Evil Plot'

By JOSEPH KAHN (for the New York Times)

BEIJING, April 26 - A top Chinese state-run newspaper said in a staff editorial this week that the wave of popular protests against Japan were part of an "evil plot" with "ulterior motives," suggesting that at least some elements of the Chinese leadership now wish to portray the demonstrations as a conspiracy to undermine the Communist Party.

The editorial, published in The Liberation Daily of Shanghai on Monday, used the most strident language to date in an escalating campaign against the anti-Japan protests, which officials had previously done relatively little to stop - and some say had even encouraged - for three weeks to mid-April.

The authorities have now made clear that they will not tolerate more protests and have detained some people involved in vandalism during earlier demonstrations, including 42 people Shanghai officials said they took into custody in recent days.

Officials are clearly concerned that the protests, if left unchecked, could evolve into a direct challenge to the party.

The newspaper, whose editorials reflect the orders of Shanghai's Communist Party leadership, did not identify the people behind the supposed plot or say how it operated. But the ambiguous wording hinted at one of two possibilities: that the protests were hijacked by antigovernment groups, or that elements in the ruling party used them to wage an internal political struggle.

"The preponderance of facts prove that the recent illegal marches were not a patriotic movement, but rather amounted to illegal behavior," the editorial said. "They were not a spontaneous movement of the masses, but rather had a backstage plot."

"The facts have already shown that the marches that occurred in some localities were an attempt to achieve hidden goals," it said. "Communist Party members must clearly see through to the essence of this struggle and understand its gravity."

The wording in the editorial, which did not immediately appear in other major state-run dailies, was striking because it departed markedly from earlier official descriptions of the protests as spontaneous expressions of popular outrage against Japan. The softer language had been widely viewed as signaling tacit approval.

For example, on April 12, even after the string of sometimes violent protests, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, repeated an official mantra.

"Some people, acting because of the incorrect attitude Japan has taken toward its history of aggression, spontaneously held protest demonstrations," Mr. Qin said. "The Chinese government asks that people participating in these marches take a cool and reasoned approach and express their views in a legal and orderly way."

A senior editor at a party-run newspaper in Beijing said the Shanghai editorial had been intended to frighten people away from taking part in any future anti-Japan demonstrations.

But a political analyst in Beijing offered a different explanation. He said the government had been sending conflicting signals about the protests because Japan policy has become a source of internal contention.

"I think you cannot rule out the possibility that the tension is not between the authorities and the people, but between some rival elements inside the party," this person said.

The analyst said there were similarities between the Monday editorial and one that appeared in People's Daily in late April 1989. It condemned student-led pro-democracy protests that spring as "counter-revolutionary," and gave early evidence of a power struggle that paralyzed the government for weeks before the military crushed the protests.

Posted by TAC at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)