By James Gibney
May 24
For all
China’s stern injunctions to Japan to remember wartime history, its
bumbling aggression in Southeast Asia suggests it also could use a
refresher course.
The arrival of a Chinese oil rig in waters
claimed by both China and Vietnam is a case in point. Demonstrations in
Vietnam over China’s bullying deteriorated into a series of attacks by
Vietnamese on foreign businesses, many run by Taiwanese with Chinese
workers, that resulted in two dead and scores injured.
China, of
all countries, should know better. In the decades before World War II,
it suffered territorial incursions and economic depredations at the
hands of Japan. These, in turn, sparked widespread popular protests and
economic boycotts.
One of the most severe reactions came after
Japan’s promulgation of its “21 Demands” in January 1915. Capitalising
on its status as one of the Allied powers in World War I, which enabled
its takeover of Germany’s territorial holdings on China’s Shandong
peninsula, Japan browbeat China into granting it de facto control over
swathes of Chinese territory and valuable railway and mining
concessions. Although China’s government went along to avoid war, the
Chinese people responded with demonstrations, strikes and boycotts. As
the historian Odd Arne Westad writes, “The Twenty-One Demands became a
watershed in Sino-Japanese relations. To many Chinese they symbolised an
aggressive Japan that had become the main threat to China’s
independence.”
Even more galling to many Chinese was the
Versailles Treaty’s ratification of Japan’s control of the Shandong
Peninsula in 1919. That sparked not only more protests and a major
national boycott but the birth of the May Fourth Movement, a larger
attempt by students, intellectuals and disaffected Chinese government
officials to create a new national consciousness. As one student
manifesto of the time put it, “China’s territory may be conquered, but
it cannot be given away.” Fear of Japan became one of the strongest
animating forces of Chinese nationalism, even as Japan’s trade and
investment ties with China, and with other countries in Asia, grew.
HISTORICAL SIMILARITIES
There
are other historical similarities between Japan’s pre-war behaviour and
China’s attitude toward its territorial disputes with five of its
Southeast Asian neighbours. The maximalism of China’s infamous “cow’s
tongue” claim to the entire South China Sea today is reminiscent of
Japan’s over-reaching 21 Demands. China’s insistence on bilateral
negotiations over territory, where size gives it maximal advantage,
mirrors Japan’s efforts to isolate China diplomatically. Like thinkers
in prewar Japan who had their own version of an Asian “Monroe Doctrine,”
strategists in 21st century China hope to displace US naval forces from
the Pacific. And the belligerence of China’s public commentary on
territorial disputes echoes the tone of Imperial Japan’s pronouncements
about China’s unwillingness to grant Japan its place in the sun -- even
if the Chinese have been less grandiloquent about it. Whereas Japan
painted itself as a “modern” country especially equipped to play by
Western rules to dominate Asia, China’s leaders are more apt to argue,
as its foreign minister did to his Southeast Asian peers in 2010, “China
is a big country, and other countries are small countries, and that’s
just a fact.”
The outcome of such attitudes will likely be the
same, too: nationalist outbursts in the countries China seeks to
intimidate, which in turn could increase the risks of miscalculation and
hostilities.
At a Chinese Foreign Ministry briefing the day
after the Vietnamese riots, a spokeswoman chided Vietnam for not doing
more to stop the mayhem. Without missing a beat, she then turned to the
subject of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s increasingly assertive
foreign policy, urging Japan “to earnestly face up to and reflect upon
its history, respect the legitimate and reasonable security concerns of
regional countries, pursue a peaceful development path and play a
constructive role in maintaining regional peace and stability.”
Historical wisdom begins at home, Chairman Xi Jinping.
(BLOOMBERG)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James
Gibney writes editorials on international affairs for Bloomberg. He was
previously features editor at the Atlantic, deputy editor at the New
York Times op-ed page and executive editor at Foreign Policy magazine.
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