China’s fear and loathing of the Japanese

00:00 05:44

Cindy Yu has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Chinese nationalism is a mixture of self-pity and cultural arrogance

Ten-year-old Shen Hangping was walking to school when he was stabbed. Japanese on his father’s side, Chinese on his mother’s, he was a pupil at the Japanese School in Shenzhen. There are only a small number of these expat schools across China, and they have recently become targets of Chinese nationalist anger. Shenzhen was the second such attack in three months. In June, a knife-wielding man tried to board a bus full of children attending the Japanese school in Suzhou. The Chinese bus attendant held him off: he killed her instead.

Knife attacks are not rare in China (just this week, a man killed three in a Shanghai shopping centre) but what makes the Suzhou and Shenzhen attacks different is that they were almost certainly racially motivated. It’s highly unlikely to be a coincidence that Hangping was attacked on the anniversary of the ‘Mukden incident’, a Japanese false flag operation of 1931 which led to the invasion of Chinese Manchuria.