2024/03/14

In this article, too, he demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
March 12, 2018
Masayuki Takayama writes an acclaimed regular column that graces the latter pages of the Weekly Shincho.
The following is from this week’s issue.
In this article, too, he demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
The emphasis in the text, except for the headline, is mine.
When to Strike China
To understand the Chinese, it may be useful to examine Xi Jinping, who salutes with his left hand, but perhaps it would be even better to examine a man named Li Yuanhong.
Like many Chinese, he could not swim.
Nevertheless, he wanted to join the navy and served aboard the cruiser Guangjia during the Sino-Japanese War.
At the Battle of the Yellow Sea, he faced the Japanese fleet, but the captain and Li lost their nerve and made an unprecedented flight in the face of the enemy.
After the ship ran aground on its own, he escaped into the sea, only to realize that he could not swim.
His subordinates rescued him when he was about to drown.
He then gave up the sea and became a brigade commander in Wuhan under the Qing dynasty.
His duty was to capture and execute revolutionary elements, including members of the Revive China Society, who challenged the Qing dynasty.
That day, too, he captured about a hundred people and had three of them shot in the evening.
Among those hundred people, however, were many soldiers under his own command.
How far had revolutionary ideology spread?
He went to bed feeling uneasy.
Then a massive explosion occurred at an arsenal in Wuchang, one of the three towns of Wuhan.
Li sensed that the revolutionaries had risen.
To them, he was the leader of their hated enemy.
The mere thought of being dragged before a crowd, having his ears cut off and his eyes gouged out, and being cut to pieces and killed made him lose control of his bladder.
He called his subordinates.
Instead of ordering them to suppress the uprising, he begged them to find him a safe hiding place.
The explosion in Wuchang was not the work of the revolutionaries.
It was an accident: a soldier carrying a barrel of gunpowder had dropped it.
But the revolutionaries made the same mistake as Li Yuanhong.
“One of our comrades has risen.”
By dawn, Wuhan was in an uproar, overflowing with revolutionaries and people swept up in revolutionary fervor.
The Japanese who brought them together included the retired military officer Ohara Takeyoshi and Kayano Nagatomo, a Japanese political adventurer on the Asian mainland who knew Sun Yat-sen.
On the other side, a German military advisory mission was organizing the Qing army.
The revolutionary game began to take on the appearance of a proxy war between Japan and Germany.
Then Li Yuanhong was discovered in his safe hiding place.
Should they slaughter him?
But the revolutionaries had no leader.
Sun Yat-sen had fled to the United States after his misuse of funds was exposed.
What about it?
Why not temporarily put Li Yuanhong, an enemy but a well-known figure, at the head of the revolutionaries?
The Xinhai Revolution had begun with a misunderstanding in the first place.
That much flexibility was possible.
Li became the revolutionaries’ leader for the time being.
That is why it is called an “outrageous revolution.”
Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen was in Denver.
The funds for the uprising came from Umeya Shokichi, a good-natured Japanese man.
Even when he learned of the Wuchang Uprising through an American newspaper, he did not immediately return home.
He headed in the opposite direction, to New York, and then traveled to London, where he busied himself raising funds while posing as China’s new leader.
He had risen ten times and failed ten times, but each time he sought investors and profited from the disaster.
He would probably fail this time, too.
But Sun Yat-sen thought that did not matter as long as the money was raised.
George Bronson Lee, an American journalist who knew Sun Yat-sen well, wrote in his book that this was the sort of man Sun was.
When Sun Yat-sen returned home, the revolution had unexpectedly succeeded.
Li Yuanhong was still firmly in place, and Yuan Shikai had also appeared.
There was no place for the impostor Sun Yat-sen.
The only thing he did was rename the Wuchang Uprising, which the Chinese called the “Xinhai Rebellion,” the “Xinhai Revolution,” following Japanese usage.
That was the only point on which the Chinese followed him.
Since then, the Chinese have come to call political table-flipping “revolution.”
At first, it was used to revise unequal treaties.
Japan negotiated with other countries and revised its treaties, but China called its approach “revolutionary diplomacy” and declared all unequal treaties null and void.
The same happened to Japan’s interests in Manchuria.
China wiped away the past and overturned the table.
Ever since, China has pursued nothing but revolutionary diplomacy, disregarding international rules.
Even when an international court ruled that it had no rights or interests in the Spratly Islands, China revolutionarily ignored that ruling.
Even in Hong Kong, where “one country, two systems” was supposed to remain in place for fifty years, China is trying to switch unilaterally to a single system.
And our Senkaku Islands are also being turned into China’s core territory through a revolutionary view of history.
Japan, too, bears responsibility for China’s arrogant and high-handed behavior.
It is about time to deliver a good, hard punch.