China has to start living in 21st century

[King Tech Quadafi]

BEIJING'S REACTION AGAINST JAPAN'S PAST ISN'T BENEFITING ANYONE, ERIC MARGOLIS SAYS

By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN

 
CHINESE RANK among the world's more intelligent people, but lately the red mandarins who run the people's republic have been doing some seriously unintelligent things.

First came a People's Congress last March that declared it would deem any move by Taiwan to full independence as an act of war. This broadside was fired just as the European Union was about to end its arms embargo against China, which urgently seeks new, hi-tech weapons.

The EU, threatened by painful U.S. retaliation, seized on China's threat to postpone ending the embargo until China's human rights record improved. So Beijing shot itself in the foot.

On the heels of this fiasco came the annual fracas over Japan's Yasukuni Shrine. The Tokyo shrine commemorates Japan's 2.5 million war dead since 1853, including remains of Japanese leaders executed as war criminals by U.S. occupation authorities.

Each year Japan's prime minister and a bevy of right-wing legislators visit Yasukuni to pay respect to the fallen. The event produces an annual outpouring of fury from China and South Korea, which accuse Japan of war crimes and militarism.

This year China's ritualized protests spread to students and turned into an explosion of anti-Japanese nationalism. Pouring fuel onto the fire, Japan's high court denied compensation to Chinese victims of wartime atrocities.

At first Beijing encouraged anti-Japanese demonstrations as a useful way of trying to block Japan's quest for a UN Security Council seat. As Chinese officials hurled insults at Tokyo, Japan-China relations hit their lowest point in 20 years.

China indeed suffered terribly from Japanese invasion during World War II. From 1937-45, China lost an estimated 11.6 million -- 3.2 million soldiers and 8.4 million civilians. Some 95 million Chinese became internal refugees.

Japan's Imperial Army, imbued by the samurai code of bushido, believed all captured soldiers deserved death and enemy civilians were scum. The Imperial Army behaved with maximum savagery in China, Korea and the Philippines.

But that was the Japan of the 1930s and 1940s. Modern Japan bears little resemblance to that era and is ardently anti-militaristic. But China and the Koreas, by continuing Japan-bashing, risk re-igniting Japanese right-wing nationalism and destabilizing North Asia.

Chinese and Korean victims of medical experiments and forced prostitution should receive compensation from Japan. And China is right to complain about Japanese textbooks that whitewash the war. But so do American, German, Canadian, and French textbooks. Chinese textbooks, meanwhile, fail to mention 2 million "bourgeois" executed by Communists, millions jailed in China's gulag, or the 30 million Chinese who perished in Mao's demented Great Leap Forward.

CRIMES OF ANOTHER AGE

If you add up those megadeaths and throw in millions more from China's 20-year civil war between Nationalists and Communists, Chinese appear to have killed far more of their own people than did the hated Japanese.

While one fully understands and sympathizes with the rancour felt by China, Japan's current generation had nothing at all to do with the 20th century's crimes.

Instead of raking up old coals, China and Japan need to find a way to share North Asia and deepen economic co-operation.

Japan deserves a seat on the Security Council. So should Germany and India -- when it settles the bloody Kashmir dispute. China's opposition to Japan's rightful UN seat is shortsighted and counterproductive.

If more proof of this were needed, the government-encouraged anti-Japanese demonstrations that raged across China quickly ran out of control. Beijing became badly frightened, fearing the protests might develop into demands for democracy.

The state press ended up denouncing the student protests as an "evil plot." The protests were suppressed. China's restive students and Japan, China's biggest investor, were left enraged.

If the 20th century teaches one lesson, it's that nationalism ranks among mankind's greatest evils. Those who whip it up often reap the whirlwind.

It's time to end using WWII as a political weapon or a means of extorting money and trade or political concessions from the vanquished. No one's hands were clean in that war.

Forgive and forget.

http://torontosun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2005/05/01/1020945-sun.html

[AndrE16686]

Yeah. China has unjustly executed and starved it's people for decades, plus Japan was (in the 90s, still is?) the highest giver of foriegn aid, especially to China and South Korea. However its pretty plain to see that Japan will never apologise and compensate it's WW 2 actions to the level that Germany did. People in Japanese society hardly know of Japan's WW2 realities. China is just exploiting this to hamper it's economic rival.