[D66] Oppose Chinese and Japanese nationalism

[Antid Oto]

Oppose Chinese and Japanese nationalism
21 September 2012

As the worsening global economic breakdown impacts on North East Asia, 
the Chinese and Japanese governments are deliberately stirring up 
chauvinist sentiment over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets in the East 
China Sea, in order to divert mounting economic and social tensions at 
home. In this heated atmosphere, the danger is that any incident, 
whether intended or not, could spark a broader conflict.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda provoked the current standoff by 
proclaiming last week that his government had completed the purchase of 
the islands from their private Japanese owners. Tokyo governor Shintaro 
Ishihara had earlier made the issue a cause célèbre in right-wing 
nationalist circles by calling for donations to buy the islands.

Noda announced his “nationalisation” plan on July 7—the anniversary of 
the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 that marked the beginning of 
Japan’s full-scale invasion of China. The timing was calculated to 
appeal to the reactionary defenders of Japanese militarism despite the 
obvious offense that it would give to Chinese people, who suffered 
terrible wartime atrocities.

Noda’s resort to Japanese nationalism is a desperate attempt to deflect 
mounting opposition in the working class. His public support fell to 
less than 20 percent after his government passed a law to double the 
consumption tax, placing new burdens on working people. Protests 
involving hundreds of thousands of people, the largest in decades in 
Japan, erupted against his decision to restart Japan’s nuclear plants 
after the Fukushima disaster.

In response to widespread anti-Japanese protests in China over the past 
week, the Japanese media has declared that these “mobs” threaten the 
Japanese nation. The government has mobilised half the coast guard and 
has put the Japanese navy on alert to repel or detain any Chinese 
fishing boats entering Japanese waters around the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

The Noda government is acting with the tacit encouragement of the Obama 
administration, which has stepped up its diplomatic and military 
pressure on China throughout Asia. During his tour of the region this 
week, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta hypocritically appealed for calm 
by both Japan and China. Washington claims not to be taking sides in the 
island dispute, but says that it would be compelled to back Japan in any 
military conflict over the islets.

The anti-Japanese protests in China, which were given the green light by 
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are no less reactionary. They are 
dominated by affluent sections of the middle classes, who see their 
future as bound up with the expansion of China as a capitalist power, 
and are deeply hostile to the working class in both China and Japan. 
This is reflected in their slogan “boycott Japanese goods,” which in 
effect, serves to boost Chinese enterprises at the expense of Japanese 
companies.

The protests in China have an overtly racist character, with many 
banners and slogans condemning “Japanese dogs” and “little Japan,” not 
to mention random attacks on Japanese nationals in China. Most 
provocative were calls for the Chinese government to “declare war on 
Japan” and banners with a nuclear mushroom cloud over Japan. These 
militaristic sentiments have been directly encouraged by Chinese media 
commentators and army officers, who boasted on TV that if war broke out 
China could play its “trump card”—a nuclear strike on Japan. This 
barbaric proposal is nothing less than a recipe for global nuclear 
conflict, as such an attack on Japan would immediately involve the US.

The resort to Chinese nationalism has a history. As the CCP regime 
initiated its program of capitalist restoration in the 1980s and 
increasingly jettisoned its socialist phrase-mongering, it turned to 
Chinese patriotism as a means of creating a social base in the emerging 
middle classes. All these processes accelerated following the crushing 
of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet 
Union in 1991.

Like the slogans on the anti-Japanese protests, the CCP’s propaganda is 
based on an essentially racist outlook. The state media deliberately 
fosters hatred toward all Japanese by continually asserting that 
Japanese society as whole was responsible for the terrible war crimes 
committed during World War II and earlier colonial wars in Asia.

In fact, Japanese workers and rural poor suffered no less under Japan’s 
militaristic regime than the Chinese masses. The organised labour 
movement and political opposition were ruthlessly suppressed and 
millions of young men dragooned into the army to serve as cannon folder 
for the ambitions of Japanese imperialism. Such is the depth of 
hostility to Japanese militarism among working people that even today 
the government confronts profound difficulties in removing the so-called 
pacifist clause from the country’s constitution.

Like their counterparts in Tokyo, the Chinese leaders are promoting 
chauvinism to try to deflect deepening social discontent with their own 
regime. The economy, which depends heavily on exports to, and investment 
from, Japan as well as the US and Europe, is being battered by 
recessionary trends in all the major capitalist centers. Already 
sluggish exports, which account for a quarter of China’s gross domestic 
product and 200 million jobs, would be hit even harder if Japanese 
corporations pulled out of the country.

In the face of large-scale social unrest, the CCP bureaucracy would not 
hesitate to unite with international capital, including the Japanese 
corporate elite, to crush its “own” working class—as it did during the 
1989 protests. The allies of Chinese workers are their class brothers 
and sisters in Japan and internationally, not the CCP regime that 
defends its own privileges and those of the Chinese capitalist class.

Japanese and Chinese workers face common oppressors, in some cases the 
very same global corporations. They must reject the nationalism and 
militarism promoted by their ruling classes and turn to a socialist and 
internationalist perspective. Only a socialist movement, based on 
unifying the working class to abolish the profit system, can eliminate 
the dangers of war in Asia and the world. This means building sections 
of the International Committee of Fourth International, the world 
Trotskyist movement, in both China and Japan.

John Chan

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/sep2012/pers-s21.shtml