Journalist Takayama Masayuki traces how centuries of enslavement under foreign dynasties shaped a Han Chinese character he calls “servile, cruel, and unafraid of lies,” and exposes Xi Jinping’s fiction of a unified “Chinese nation” in order to justify rule over Uyghurs and Tibet.

December 10, 2021
The following is from Takayama Masayuki’s serialized column that adorns the last page of yesterday’s issue of Weekly Shincho.
This essay too proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is must-reading not only for the Japanese people but for people all over the world.

Xi the Land Swindler
Xi Jinping often speaks of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
I had thought “Chinese” was simply the name of a cuisine, like Italian or French.
I did not know it was supposed to be the name of an ethnicity.
What is more, he says it is the ethnicity that produced all the culture that ever flourished in China.
That is also the first I have heard of it.

The history of China has been watched over by the Great Wall.
Inside it, in the Central Plain, lived the Han people, and the pattern was that “barbarians” would cross the Wall and establish dynasties.
Thus the northern Di barbarians founded Yin, the western Rong founded Zhou, and the eastern Yi founded Qin, producing brilliant bronze and iron civilizations.
After that, the Xianbei and the Mongols also came.
During all that time, the Han people of the Central Plain lived as slaves under foreign dynasties.

To be enslaved in one’s own country is a bitter fate indeed.
There is even an analysis that this gave birth to the Han people’s national character of being servile, cruel, and unafraid of telling lies.

In history there are blank periods when no “barbarians” came.
In those gaps there were times when the Han people quietly founded their own states.
The Han of the second century B.C. was one of those.
Perhaps they were so happy about it that from then on they used the name of that dynasty, Han, as the name of their ethnicity.

But because their roots were those of slaves, the rule of the Han dynasty fell into confusion, riddled with suspicion and greed.
Never before had the common people so eagerly longed for the barbarians to come quickly.
After that happy barbarian rule returned, but thirteen hundred years later the nightmare of another Han-ethnic dynasty, Ming, arose, and six hundred years after that today’s Chinese Communist regime was founded.

Among Han-ethnic regimes, the Chinese Communist Party stands out above the rest.
Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it has already killed fifty million people, and even now it is diligently adding to the total.

Looking back over history this way, nowhere do we find the “great Chinese nation.”
“No, no, that’s not how it is,” says Xi Jinping.
The Han, the western Rong, and so on all blended together with one another long ago, he tells us.
Now there exists only the “Chinese nation,” a mix of many ethnicities.

With all due respect, I cannot readily nod along with the theory that the Han people vanished long ago.
For example, in the time of the Five Barbarians and Sixteen Kingdoms, the Han clearly existed.
When the Jurchens and others who came from the north saw someone behaving without propriety or acting roughly, they would rebuke him by saying, “He is just like a Han.”
From that came words such as akkan (villain), chikan (molester), and burai-kan (ruffian).
Do those terms not apply as they are to today’s Chinese as well?

When the Manchu Qing ruled, the Han were there too.
They let their hair grow wild.
So the Manchus made them wear their hair neatly in queues.
Those who refused had their heads cut off, and the Han population decreased somewhat.

In the Opium War, the Han sided with the British forces.
Their banner read “Destroy the Manchus and Revive the Han.”
It meant to overthrow the Manchus and take back a country of the Han.

It was in the Sino-Japanese War that Japanese for the first time saw crowds of living Han people with their own eyes.
Yamagata Aritomo instructed, “The enemy (the Han) have from ancient times had a nature that is cruel.
If taken captive alive, one will be subjected to torments worse than death (cutting off the genitals, slicing off ears and nose, gouging out eyes), and in the end one will have one’s hands and feet cut off.”
After losing the Sino-Japanese War, Empress Dowager Cixi, reflecting on the defeat, abolished the civil service examinations and made study abroad the path to becoming an official.
The first case was Wang Jingwei, who had placed first in the examinations, and he was sent to study in the very Japan that had defeated them.
This gives a sense of the largeness of Empress Dowager Cixi, but her reputation is bad.
It is said that she diverted funds for the Beiyang Fleet, or that she cut off the hands and feet of her rival, the favored concubine Consort Zhen, and stuffed her alive into a jar.
But that was what Lü Hou, the wife of Liu Bang of the Han, did.

The Beiyang Fleet too had been given twice the equipment and fighting ships of the Japanese fleet.
They lost because the Han officers and men ran away.
They are extraordinarily skilled at shifting blame and at slander and defamation.
That is proof that as late as the time of Empress Dowager Cixi the Han as an ethnicity were vigorously in existence.

For these reasons, Xi Jinping’s theory that “the Han vanished long ago” has no foundation whatsoever.
The arrogant and cruel behavior of today’s Chinese Communist regime can only look like it is saying, “The Han are as lively as ever.”

Why, then, did he make the “Han” disappear and create the fictitious “Chinese nation”?
Perhaps because that way the Chinese Communist Party can claim that Uyghurs and Tibetans are also part of its own territory.
Xi is hardly first-rate, either as an emperor or as a land swindler.