Through Masayuki Takayama’s essay, this piece traces both the possibility of Japan-China cooperation that emerged after the Sino-Japanese War and the American diplomatic strategy that severed it.
The May Fourth Movement was not merely a patriotic movement, but also America’s first diplomatic victory in driving Japan and China into hostility.
By examining student exchanges, Yuan Shikai, the Twenty-One Demands, and the Paris Peace Conference, this essay sharply illuminates that decisive historical turning point.

2019-05-31
It should be called the day of the first American diplomatic victory that produced hostility between Japan and China.
And now that same United States is moving to crush China.
Such is the subtlety of diplomacy, one might say.

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s famous column published in Shukan Shincho, which came out the day before yesterday.
It is an essay that splendidly proves once again this week that my assessment of Masayuki Takayama as the one and only journalist in the postwar world is exactly right.

A People That Cannot Change

It is often said as if fixed fact that the dwelling place of the Han people lies inside that Great Wall.
But the wall itself is nothing very great.
It is all appearance and anyone can cross it.
There was once suspicion that Microsoft, when installing the OS used to start up a PC, had stolen software from another company.
“No, no, in our company each division is separated by high partitions so that theft cannot occur,” Bill Gates explained.
The newspapers mocked this as “Bill’s Long Wall.”
Meaning that it was not even enough to serve as a boundary.
The real wall was much the same, and by around the fifth century, Xianbei, Jie, Xiongnu, and others came pouring in from the north and west into Han territory and settled there.
This is what is called the period of the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians.
Names like Xianbei and Xiongnu were frivolous names given by the Han in contempt toward the barbarians, but how did those barbarians see the Han?
According to Takashi Suyama, professor at Nagasaki University and a specialist on overseas Chinese, they were not very well behaved.
Their conduct was bad, and they quickly turned to violence and outrage.
So afterward, when people saw a bad man, they came to call him an “akkan,” a “chikan,” a “buraikan,” or a “taishokukan,” meaning someone just like a Han Chinese.
Xi Jinping speaks of “the great revival of the Han people.”
Whether they were great or not, terms like villain, pervert, and hooligan still seem persuasive even now.
Xi Jinping, before anything else, ought to think about a level of civilization that would not be scorned by the Xianbei and the Xiongnu.

And yet even among such Chinese, there was a time when many young people went a considerable distance in trying to improve their country and become a better people.
That was after the Sino-Japanese War.
The Qing, a Manchu dynasty, seriously considered the meaning of its defeat by Japan, abandoned the Han learning of the Four Books and Five Classics, and sought to pursue Western learning as the Japanese had done.
So it founded Jingshi Daxuetang, later Peking University, and encouraged study abroad.
The most common destination for study abroad was yesterday’s enemy, Japan.
One can see the broad-mindedness of the Manchu dynasty in that.
The Japanese side, too, quickly had universities actively accept Chinese students.
Thus Lu Xun, Zhou Enlai, Qiu Jin, and Chen Duxiu, among many others, with as many as 10,000 young people a year studying in Japan.
There they learned about the world, and when they returned home, Qiu Jin devoted herself to women’s liberation, while Chen Duxiu and Song Jiaoren called for parliamentary government.
And in fact, it bore fruit.
After the Xinhai Revolution, the first election in Chinese history was held, and a parliament was opened.
Half of its members had studied in Japan.
It was the moment when Chinese who had been nothing but hooligans sincerely grieved for their country and burst into flame.
It was a strange spectacle.
On the one hand, the country of Kublai that had trampled even Europe.
On the other, the emerging nation that had smashed the mightiest land and naval forces in the world, those of Russia.
And these two were about to join hands.
“If Japan and China collaborate, they will endanger the interests white nations hold in Asia,” warned the German minister in Beijing, von Greil, speaking of the Yellow Peril already at hand.
The United States felt the same way.
To prevent Japan-China cooperation, nothing would be better than first stopping the flow of students toward Japan.
The United States built Tsinghua University and enticed students to study in America with all expenses paid.
The indemnities from the Boxer Rebellion were used to fund it.
Gu Weijun, who would become a leading spearhead of anti-Japan activity, crossed to America immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, followed by Hu Shi, Dong Xian’guang, Wang Chonghui, and Wu Tingfang.
Among them was the eleven-year-old Soong Mei-ling.

The Japan-China partnership that had seemed so close took a dark turn under Yuan Shikai.
Yuan, bought by the United States, dissolved the parliament that leaned strongly toward Japan and doused the burning aspirations of the Han Chinese.
At the same time, under the guidance of American diplomats, he turned the Twenty-One Demands, which had been no more than an application to extend Manchurian rights, into a political issue and made Japan out to be the enemy of the Chinese.
At the Paris Peace Conference, the United States had the Chinese representatives, who had no real speaking power, deliver long speeches attacking Japan.
The journalist Dong Xian’guang stirred up anti-Japan sentiment, while Gu Weijun and the American minister Paul Reinsch incited the students, and that became the May Fourth Movement.
The relationship between Japan and China turned 180 degrees exactly as the United States intended.
Now, one hundred years later, this year Xi Jinping said, “The core of the May Fourth Movement was Han patriotism.”
That is wrong.
It should be called the day of the first American diplomatic victory that produced hostility between Japan and China.
And now that same United States is moving to crush China.
Such is the subtlety of diplomacy, one might say.