From the Radio Free Asia (RFA), thanks to David Kelly for the translation:
Wen Jiabao’s official visit to Japan this week has been referred to by the Chinese media as an ice-melting journey. Public opinion everywhere is of the view that the years of Sino-Japanese freeze triggered by Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine should now come to an end.
Why did Koizumi insist on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine? In addition to domestic political needs, I think he really wanted to teach the Chinese people a lesson. Over the years, the Chinese authorities have always interpreted the Japanese political leaders’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine as an “immortal dream of the militarists,” and refusing to confess to war crimes was intentionally injuring the feelings of the victims of Japanese aggression. Koizumi however argued that this interpretation completely ignored Japan’s political reality: Japan is now a democratic country; no one will repeat the mistakes of the past. In the view of most Japanese, reflection on past crimes of aggression should be impersonal. China and other invaded countries should understand this attitude of contemporary Japanese.
But the facts show that Koizumi’s ideas were unintelligible to Chinese and Koreans, and politically, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine is unacceptable to China and South Korea. The crux of the matter is that while Japanese can forgive their ancestors who are guilty of war crimes, Chinese and Koreans cannot. On this issue, the Chinese and Koreans cannot respect the feelings of the Japanese, and Koizumi, as well as any Japanese politicians who do not understand this point, are bound to hurt the feelings of Chinese people and other victims of aggression. China’s lesson to Koizumi and other Japanese politicians is that they should think twice about words and deeds touching on the history of the war of invasion.
I think China’s other lesson for Japan’s political leaders is how lacking is their understanding of their giant neighbour, which can be very dangerous. Koizumi, I believe, had no idea that the Chinese government would condone the students taking to the streets, nor that they would attack Japanese diplomatic offices and businesses. For Japan, these acts by the Chinese will not do them any good, but China is quite incapable of preventing the occurrence of such incidents. It should now be clear to the Japanese that China’s internal politics are far from taking a rational turn, and Japan must be prepared for all possibilities, not least the worst ones. The Japan-Australia security alliance is a response to the possibility of China completely losing its reason.
Koizumi’s insistence on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, though unlikely to be accepted by Chinese or Koreans, actually taught the Chinese a lesson. He successfully mobilized the people to support his domestic reform, and China, try as it might, was unable to link the new forces supporting Koizumi to the clich√©s about militarism being restored. Some of China’s political elite were deeply hurt when Koizumi dared to hurt the Chinese people’s feelings, relying on domestic public opinion, leading them to become increasingly intoler¬≠ant towards the current backwardness of the Chinese political system. In a statement published online, Liu Yazhou and some other senior military officers appealed for dialogue between the highest authorities and popular oppositional forces. The significance of this incident transcends that of the students demonstrating in the streets. Since then, top Party leaders thinking of playing with Sino-Japanese relations to maintain power must consider the prospect of counter-intentional outcomes.
China’s leaders want to teach the Japanese to learn from history, but they are themselves quite ignorant of their own history, and more importantly, they are more frightened than are the leaders of Japanese of the people knowing more of the truth. This is because the more the public knows, the worse this impacts on their rule. Japan however does not have this problem.
This year is the 70th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and the generation of the Sino-Japanese war will soon all have passed away. The conflicts cause by the two countries’ historical issues will stimulate young people to explore what actually happened in the past. As CCTV current affairs anchor Bai Yansong found in his interviews in Japan, what some Japanese youth see at the Yasukuni Shrine is the abhorrence of their war crimes. What about Chinese youth? Will they be content to know only the number of Chinese the Japanese army killed in Nanjing? Won’t they ask how China could be invaded by tiny Japan? Why Mao Zedong wanted to thank the Japanese for invading China? From the answers to these questions, I hope the young Chinese learn more important things than the young Japanese.
The original Chinese text is here, via the New Century Net.
