Anti-Japan Education in China 中国政府による反日教育

Education must strive to promote humanism
By James Wang 王景弘

A few days ago, Emperor Akihito of Japan appeared on national TV with an impassioned address regarding the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear reactor crisis that had rocked his country. He expressed the hope that more victims would be saved, saying that even one more survivor would make the continued rescue attempts worthwhile. One couldn’t help but be touched by the compassion and empathy in his words.

On the other side of the world, in north Africa, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, in the face of attempts to topple him, was giving the order for his forces to kill his own people, without mercy. That is, one more death wouldn’t matter.

Taiwan’s neighbor, which some regard as their “motherland,” was led 22 years ago by Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), a man whose name ironically means “Little Peace,” but who preferred to countenance the killing of thousands of his own people to preserve two decades of “stability.”

Some Chinese may well berate me for comparing Akihito with Deng, but the only reason I use the example of Akihito is that he exhibited the emotional response one would expect from an ordinary person.

There is a well-known Buddhist saying in China: “It is better to save one life than to build a seven-story pagoda.” The meaning is simple: to kill is wrong, to save lives is good.

It is quite astonishing that some Chinese netizens have actually been falling over themselves to welcome, even celebrate, the Japanese earthquake. In Taiwan, too, some extreme pan-blue netizens have been advocating retaking the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) by force, and even attacking Tokyo, slaughtering the millions of “Jap devils” who live there.

This type of thinking is the product of brainwashing by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the education system in China, which promotes anti-Japanese sentiment and non-humanistic ideas. Both the CCP and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) exploit the memory of the Nanjing Massacre to teach anti-Japanese sentiment and even outright hatred for Japanese. They are not concerned with teaching the specifics of the massacre; they just want the anti--Japanese feeling to live on in later generations.

From a humanistic perspective, the killing of innocents is a crime, whether it is the massacre of thousands or the taking of a single life. Since the Chinese vilify the Japanese for the Nanjing Massacre, why do they have a portrait of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), the instigator of the Cultural Revolution, displayed for all to see — and praise — in Tiananmen Square? And why is the person responsible for the 228 Massacre, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), given in his own “memorial hall”?

According to one official Chinese estimate, as many as 2 million people died as a direct result of the Cultural Revolution, many times more than the number of people who lost their lives during the Nanjing Massacre. Some people believe as many as 200,000 were killed during the 228 Massacre. In the nationalist ideology of the CCP and KMT, Mao and Chiang are heroes, despite having slaughtered their own “compatriots.” This is a warped view resulting from a warped education system.

Taiwan is now a democracy and as such education in this country should be focused on the pursuit of the truth, instilling in students a moral compass and the cultivation of a belief in the sacred nature of life, so that no one else ever slaughters others again.

James Wang is a media commentator.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
Fri, Mar 25, 2011

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit.../25/2003499037

Why China Loves to Hate Japan

By Matthew Forney/Beijing Saturday, Dec. 10, 2005

You don't have to look far to see why Chinese grow up learning to hate Japan. Take the forthcoming children's movie, "Little Soldier Zhang," which Beijing-based director Sun Lijun says he made having "learned a lot from Disney." The film chronicles the adventures in the 1930s of Little Zhang, a cute 12-year-old boy feeling his way through an unfriendly world. But the resemblance to Pinocchio ends there. After Japanese invaders shoot Little Zhang's grandmother in the back, the boy seeks revenge by joining an underground Red Army detachment. He moves among heroic Chinese patriots, sniveling collaborators and sadistic Japanese. The finale comes with Little Zhang helping blow up a trainload of Japanese soldiers and receiving a cherished reward: a pistol with which to kill more Japanese. "I thought about including one sympathetic Japanese character, but this is an anti-Japan war movie and I don't want to confuse anyone," says Sun, who will premier his film on International Children's Day.
Chinese kids can be forgiven for thinking Japan is a nation of "devils," a slur used without embarrassment in polite Chinese society. They were raised to feel that way, and not just through cartoons. Starting in elementary school children learn reading, writing and the "Education in National Humiliation." This last curriculum teaches that Japanese "bandits" brutalized China throughout the 1930s and would do so today given half a chance. Although European colonial powers receive their share of censure, the main goal is keeping memories of Japanese conquest fresh. Thousands of students each day, for instance, take class trips to the Anti-Japanese War Museum in Beijing to view grainy photos of war atrocities—women raped and disemboweled, corpses of children stacked like cordwood. As one 15-year-old girl in a blue and yellow school uniform, Ji Jilan, emerged from a recent visit to the gallery, she told a TIME correspondent: "After seeing this, I hate Japanese more than ever."

So it is not surprising that this nationalist animosity reaches the highest levels of government. The Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, recently created shockwaves by saying he would refuse to meet with Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, at a ground-breaking summit of East Asian nations that begins Monday. Reasons include rising Japanese nationalism and a recent visit by the Japanese Premier to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates Japan's war dead, including some war criminals from the time of Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s. But underneath that diplomatic spat over history is a struggle for power and influence in East Asia that is increasingly straining Beijing-Tokyo relations. "The China-Japan relationship in the near term is more tense and worrisome than the potential for conflict elsewhere in the region," says Thomas Christiansen, an expert in Asian security at Princeton University.

Of course, nobody expects China to forget the past. The war launched by Japan's militarist leaders killed an estimated 20 million Chinese. During the Rape of Nanjing in 1937-38, soldiers butchered 300,000 civilians, according to Chinese figures. Most Japanese are aware of what happened but their society has never engaged in the type of introspection common in Germany after the Holocaust. Carefully worded official apologies have landed far short of the five-star kowtow demanded by Beijing, senior Tokyo officials occasionally deny atrocities and just last April a new government-approved textbook written by right-wing groups downplayed the wartime brutality visited on civilians.

The problem is that just as Japanese soldiers once dehumanized Chinese, Beijing's propaganda often paints Japanese as pure monsters. Grade school textbooks recount the callous brutality of Japanese soldiers in graphic detail, and credit the Communist Party with defeating Japan. (Another reason for Japan's surrender, it says, was the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S.) More moderate voices are silenced. A 2000 film by one of China's leading directors, Jiang Wen, remains banned because it depicted friendliness between a captured Japanese soldier and Chinese villagers. Although the film showed plenty of brutality, censors ruled that "Devils at the Doorstep" gave viewers "the impression that Chinese civilians neither hated nor resisted Japanese invaders."

Why keep up the propaganda onslaught 60 years after Japan's surrender? Many suspect China's unelected leaders hope to use anti-Japan sentiment to buttress their own legitimacy. Ever since the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, support for the Communist Party has rested on the shaky foundation of economic growth. Nationalism, by contrast, could prove more enduring. "Reviving war memories keeps the nation united against Japan, and behind the party," says Beijing-based writer Liu Xiaobo. It's a risky strategy. Anti-Japan sentiment grew into rowdy street protests in Beijing and Shanghai in April, which the quickly government suppressed for fear they could spin out of control. But until China's leaders have some new pillar of legitimacy, Liu predicts, "the Japanese will stay devils in China."

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...139759,00.html

Some believe that anti-Japanese sentiment in China is partially the result of political manipulation by the Communist Party of China. However, there are also signs showing that the Chinese government is also trying to cautiously cool down the anti-Japanese movement, because anti-Japanese riots and attacks have become increasingly common and there are signs showing it is going toward beyond the government's control. In 2012, during an anti-Japanese riot in Shenzhen, the crowd unsuccessfully attacked the city government's administrative building and demanded the government to declare war on Japan.

According to this view, Mao Zedong and the Communist party claimed the victory against the Japanese invaders as part of their legacy. Initially, there was no need to resort to anti-Japanese sentiment because the principal enemies of the new country were the United States and later the Soviet Union.

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the disruption of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping and other leaders decided to take the country on a path of economic development based on the market economy, without relinquishing the party's grip on political power. According to this view, the government resorted to nationalism, including an appeal to the CCP's anti-Japanese credentials, in order to reassert its legitimacy to lead the country and defuse the inevitable tensions that would accompany rapid economic growth. Today, surveys have shown that anti-Japanese sentiment in China is higher among the current generation than among the Chinese who actually lived through the occupation of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ja...iment_in_China