Focus on patriotic education in China after knife attack on Japanese student

BEIJING: On September 18, China commemorated the 93rd anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 with a pledge to “never forget national humiliation,” a long-standing slogan used by state media and the government in promotional materials.

Museums unveiled new artifacts from the “War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression,” as the 14-year period leading up to the end of World War II is known in China. The students took part in assembly lectures and wrote reflective essays.

Influencers have uploaded tearful videos of themselves visiting historical sites, such as the Datong Mass Grave Memorial in Shanxi province, which commemorates the 60,000 miners who were tortured or killed at the Datong coal mine during the war.

“This video may make some people uncomfortable, but I believe every Chinese citizen has the responsibility to watch it to the end. Because this is a pain for our nation that you can’t get rid of,” said a content creator who went to the memorial. She has more than 18 million followers on Douyin.

On the same day, a Chinese man stabbed a 10-year-old Japanese student in Shenzhen, who later died from his injuries. It was the second such attack in China in three months involving Japanese nationals.

It was the most serious in a series of anti-Japanese incidents in China in recent years, sparked by memories of the history of war between the two countries, which remains an emotionally charged issue for Chinese people.

Beginning in 1937, the Japanese invasion spread to the rest of China, and by 1945, when the war ended, millions of Chinese had died.

After the attack on the boy, then-Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa called on her counterpart Wang Yi to conduct a full investigation, give Japan a clear explanation and take preventative measures.

Wang said China would handle the “individual case” in accordance with the law and urged Japan to view the matter calmly and not politicize it. The couple met on September 23rd on the sidelines of a United Nations event in New York.

Now the Chinese are in a process of soul-searching. Online discussions have pondered whether nationalist upbringing in China may have played a role in triggering violence, although police investigations have not revealed a motive for the attack.

Such education broadly refers to what is taught in school textbooks, mass media such as war films, documentaries and news reports, as well as commemorative events and official speeches by Chinese leaders.

The Chinese have complex and deep-rooted feelings about Japan.

Many laid wreaths at the Japanese school in Shenzhen after the September 18 incident, condemning the violence against ordinary Japanese.

At the same time, many believe negative feelings toward Japan are justified and support the government’s efforts to maintain awareness of history, such as the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.

Xiao Zhonghua, 58, said the Chinese people remembered the Mukden incident – when the Japanese detonated dynamite on a Japanese-controlled railway near Mukden, now Shenyang, on September 18, 1931, blaming the Chinese and used this as a pretext to invade Manchuria – to commemorate a time when China was weak and to protect themselves from the resurgence of Japanese militarism.

“Japanese politicians’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine constantly irritate the Chinese people and remind them that they do not admit their mistakes. How do you think the Chinese feel about this?” he added.

The last time a sitting Japanese prime minister visited the shrine, which honors the country’s war dead, was in December 2013 by Shinzo Abe, although other politicians continued to make regular visits.

It is a major weakness for Beijing, which sees such visits as attempts to legitimize Japan’s past militarism.

At the same time, most Chinese people are patriotic, said Mr. Xiao, a Wuhan-based economics professor by profession who blogs frequently on a range of topics, from international affairs to the stock market.

However, the Chinese public also despises unrealistic films and television shows about the Sino-Japanese War, such as those in which Chinese soldiers with superhuman strength kill Japanese soldiers, he said. “If this reflects an ‘anti-Japanese’ theme, then most Chinese people do not support it.”

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on September 23 that “China does not teach its people to hate Japan” in response to a reporter’s question about anti-Japanese statements on social media following the Shenzhen incident.

He added that learning from history “is not to perpetuate hatred, but to prevent the tragedy of war from repeating itself.”

Nevertheless, the fear of the Japanese community in China after the incident stems from an atmosphere of Chinese hostility towards them, both online and in the real world, against the backdrop of Sino-Japanese relations strained by territorial disputes, geopolitical rivalry, etc Chinese perception that the Japanese do not regret their wartime atrocities.

When Mr. Abe was assassinated in Japan in July 2022, restaurants in China held promotions to “celebrate” his death.

Xenophobic comments had to be deleted from online platforms such as Weibo and Douyin when a Chinese man attacked a Japanese mother and her three-year-old son with a knife in Suzhou in June.

Although Chinese authorities promised a thorough investigation, experts believe the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a vested interest in keeping anti-Japanese sentiment simmering.

For example, in 2017, China’s Ministry of Education ordered primary and secondary school textbooks to change the start year of China’s War of Resistance against the Japanese from 1937 to 1931.

The focus was more on the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Previously, the Marco Polo Bridge incident on July 7, 1937 was considered the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted until the surrender of Japanese troops in China on July 9 . September 1945 lasted.

Observers saw this move in part as enhancing the CCP’s credibility in resisting the Japanese invasion.

Associate Professor Yinan He, an expert on China-Japan relations at Lehigh University in the United States, noted that China’s historical narratives about Japan have changed over time due to the CCP’s political goals.

For example, in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, official propaganda began to focus more on Japanese war atrocities and heroic Chinese resistance fighters in order to bolster the CCP’s legitimacy.

Chinese accounts have been one-sided and have provided only part of the truth, neglecting other aspects of history that could provide balance, said Prof. He, who has written extensively on Sino-Japanese history.

These include Japan’s generous economic aid to China, which helped China’s economy recover after the war, and the changes in Japanese society since then.

“I see Chinese history teaching and mass media narratives as a big factor contributing to today’s situation (an antagonistic view of Japan).”

Joshua Zhang, 38, said patriotic education in school often focuses on foreign invaders, and patriotic language is often mixed with insults and ridicule, including terms such as “Japanese devils.”

The Nanjing-based computer programmer, who has spoken out on social media about the potential negative impact of patriotic education, believes that educators, whether intentionally or not, have sown the seeds of hatred in students’ hearts to varying degrees.

Even though Japan has committed heinous crimes against China, every subsequent generation of ordinary Japanese people should not be asked to pay for them again.

“When does the cycle of revenge end? The bitter taste of the older generation is passed on to the next. That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. – The Straits Times/ANN