For a number of reasons, nationalist sentiments have led many Chinese to label Japan as treacherous, pugnacious and condescending, especially as the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has begun currying favor with the new government in Washington while finding ways to bypass its “Peace Constitution” and remove the fetters imposed on its military.
Thanks to a steady diet of government-led propaganda badmouthing and slinging mud at Japan, the Chinese people may have lost touch with a clear, balanced vision of the neighboring East Asian country. And this growing animosity comes on top of the historical ill feelings following Imperial Japan’s invasion that wrought eight years of havoc on their country.
In recent decades, ties between Beijing and Tokyo have been under strain because of a slew of incidents, ranging from Japan’s perceived insincerity over its World War II crimes to the bitter territorial row concerning the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands. But the underlying cause is China’s ascent in global stature in contrast to Japan’s economic stagnation, says Zhu Feng, director of Nanjing University’s Institute for International Studies, in an op-ed in People’s Daily.
“China’s overall strength has long surpassed that of Japan, as measured by economic output – China’s gross domestic product was almost three times that of Japan in 2016 – as well as defense capabilities, and the Chinese people are eager to break the historical stigma [now that] the day that Japan could invade a precarious China is long gone,” said the scholar.
These not-so-heartening developments are also part of the reason Japanese voters bought Abe’s vision to revive their country and gave him a second term, making him the nation’s longest-serving prime minister since the mid-19th century.
“Amid the Chinese people’s shared enmity, there also exists a subtle phobia about a stronger China among Japanese,” Zhu said. “Abe is exploring this phobia to consolidate his power to pursue, albeit under the veil of peace and democracy, the revival of Japan’s own nationalism.”
Japan is also taking a leading role in the containment of China, along with Australia, India and Southeast Asian countries, besides its efforts to persuade the administration of US President Donald Trump not to pull out of Asia.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Abe on the sidelines of this year’s APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, this month, which followed their brief encounter in Germany while attending the Group of 20 Summit in July. The two leaders agreed to normalize ties after years of tit-for-tat and mutual brush-offs. The diplomatic minuet is expect to end amicably – at least for the time being.
Fung , seems u r worrying about next invasion of China by the Quad group, soon u ll experience the torture of Chinese people worst than the Japanese did.. this time they gonna beat ur ass for ur crime against ur lust of expansionism in the name of peace
Japanese Mass killings
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, estimates that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most likely 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. According to Rummel, “This democide [i.e., death by government] was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture.”
According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937–45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 million in the course of the war.
The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937–38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
In Southeast Asia, the Manila massacre of February 1945 resulted in the death of 100,000 civilians in the Philippines. It is estimated that at least one out of every 20 Filipinos died at the hand of the Japanese during the occupation.
In the Sook Ching massacre of February 1942, Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore, said during an interview with National Geographic that there were between 50,000 and 90,000 casualties.
There were other massacres of civilians, e.g. the Kalagong massacre. In wartime Southeast Asia, the Overseas Chinese and European diaspora were special targets of Japanese abuse; in the former case, motivated by an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the historic expanse and influence of Chinese culture that did not exist with the Southeast Asian indigenes, and the latter, motivated by a racist Pan-Asianism and desire to show former colonial subjects the impotence of their Western masters.
Historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that a “Three Alls Policy” (Sankō Sakusen) was implemented in China from 1942 to 1945 and was in itself responsible for the deaths of “more than 2.7 million” Chinese civilians. This scorched earth strategy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, directed Japanese forces to “Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All.” Additionally, captured allied service personnel were massacred in various incidents, including:
Japan is one of the biggest threats to asia security
A list of japanese atrocities:
Massacres:
Alexandra Hospital massacre
Banka Island massacre
Changjiao massacre
Kalagong massacre
Laha massacre
Manila massacre
Nanking Massacre
Palawan massacre
Pantingan River Massacre
Parit Sulong Massacre
Sook Ching massacre
Sulug Island massacre
Tol Plantation massacre
Wake Island massacre
Units
Unit 100; Unit 200; Unit 516; Unit 543; Unit 731; Unit 773; Unit 1644; Unit 1855; Unit 2646; Unit 8604; Unit 9420
War crimes
Bataan Death March
Burma Railway
Chichijima incident
Comfort women
Hell ships
Panjiayu tragedy
Sandakan Death Marches
Three Alls Policy
War crimes in Manchukuo
Changteh chemical weapon attack
Kaimingye germ weapon attack
The Chinese are bad mouthed, mud-slung, and insulted with stereotypes, bad portrayed, on daily basis by the Japanese media. Let alone the plenitude of anti-Chinese books that are written yearly. The article’s author fails to mention this.
You find far more anti-Chinese rhetoric in Japan, than anti-Japanese rhetoric in China,
Japan did very ugly things in WWII (killing aprox. 10% of China’s population) and now they are whitewashing the past and failed to sincerely ask for forgiveness. Facts about their past and present activities are all over the internet.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM