Excellent summary of the Chinese anti-Japan demonstrations
The Telegraph has the best summary we’ve seen of the protests, covering most of the points we have discussed here in the past couple of days. Excerpt:
Despite the use of hundreds of police to stop a planned march in Beijing, following the stoning of the Japanese embassy the previous weekend, there were still indications that the protests had the government’s approval. But there are also fears that the authorities cannot put the nationalist genie they have conjured up back into its bottle. Through the People’s Daily, the official Communist newspaper, party leaders stressed the importance of “social stability”, heralding a possible parallel crackdown on peasant protests against corruption and land clearances.
The immediate cause of the anti-Japanese outrage is the re-issuing of a Japanese textbook which glosses over wartime atrocities, such as the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Nanjing massacre. The book is produced by a Japanese Right-wing group and used in only a tiny minority of schools, a fact of which most Chinese are unaware. But the Communist leadership has used it to whip up public sentiment.
Its political goals are clear: to prevent Japan’s winning a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, thereby diluting the force of China’s veto. It is also alarmed at the Right-wing Japanese government’s growing willingness to discuss remilitarisation, including the possible development of nuclear weapons. The final straw was a joint paper with Japan’s ever closer ally, the United States, calling a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue a strategic concern - the first time Tokyo had intervened in China’s most sensitive security issue.