China’s fear and loathing of the Japanese

00:00 05:44

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

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.

The two attacks were manifestations of a new development in China’s long-standing fear and loathing of the Japanese. The latest bout of antagonism has been over Tokyo Electric Power’s plan to release mildly radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. Even though the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency approved the process and classified the radiation risks as ‘negligible’, the Chinese government and state media have been in a frenzy. China has banned all Japanese seafood while its censors took down scientific blogs that fact-checked the government’s apocalyptic warnings.

At the same time, China’s anti-espionage law has broadened the definition of spying, encouraging the public to keep a lookout for potential infiltrators in their midst (read: foreigners or Chinese who might have dealings with foreigners).