This essay examines the lessons of Japan’s diplomacy toward China through Japan’s role in ending China’s post-Tiananmen isolation and the later rise of anti-Japan education and anti-Japan movements there.
As China begins to face renewed international isolation amid worsening U.S.-China tensions, it sharply asks how Japan should respond.

2019-06-05
With the recent U.S.-China confrontation, China is once again beginning to become isolated in the international community.
The situation is coming to resemble that which followed the Tiananmen Incident.
And China’s diplomacy, too, is once again beginning to shift toward Japan.

The following is from Akio Yaita’s serialized Sankei Shimbun column, “China Sketches,” published today.
By now, many people surely know that Mr. Yaita, having grown up in China as one of the remaining Japanese war orphans there, is one of the foremost China experts of our time.
There Is No “Crane’s Return of Favor” in Beijing.
“If I ever have a chance to meet Toshiki Kaifu, I would like to ask him directly.
Why did Japan stop the economic sanctions against China at that time?”
In late May, at a small izakaya in Ōta Ward, Tokyo, Wang Dan, the Chinese democracy activist and former student leader, took a large swallow of beer and spoke more forcefully.
After the Tiananmen Incident of June 1989, in which the democratization movement was crushed, Mr. Wang, who had been number one on the Chinese authorities’ wanted list, chose prison rather than taking the chance to flee overseas.
Mr. Wang said, “To keep fighting in prison was an offering to the memory of my comrades who had died.”
He had also believed that “there was no way the international community would recognize a regime that deployed tanks and massacred students.
The democratic nations would surely support our struggle.”
However, while the whole world was severely denouncing China over human rights and democratization and forming a sanctions network against it through economic sanctions, Japan was the first to resume yen loans to China.
In August 1991, when Mr. Wang heard in prison the news that then Prime Minister Kaifu had visited China, becoming the first leader of a major country to do so after the Tiananmen Incident, he said, “I was so frustrated that I cried.”
On the other hand, Chinese foreign affairs officials reportedly regarded Kaifu’s visit to China as “a great victory for China’s diplomacy toward Japan.”
Regarding the thinking of the Japanese government at the time, a Japan-China relations figure involved in Kaifu’s visit explained that “there was a feeling that, as a neighboring country, China should not be isolated,” and also said that “there was hope that if China were drawn into the international community, it might gradually move toward democratization.”
The year after Kaifu’s visit, Japan also accepted China’s request and realized the Emperor’s visit to China.
Japan thus ended up playing a major role in lifting China’s isolation in the international community.
However, in the autumn of 1992, when China as a nation was welcoming the Emperor’s visit, the Jiang Zemin administration began construction of more than one hundred anti-Japanese war memorial museums throughout the country.
Believing that the only way to maintain the authority of the Communist Party, which had been damaged by the Tiananmen Incident, was to stir up nationalism, the Jiang administration compiled the “Outline for Patriotic Education” and quietly began a “campaign of criticism against Japan” centered on the Sino-Japanese War.
Since 2000, anti-Japan demonstrations have repeatedly broken out in China, and Japanese companies have even been attacked and burned.
Those who played the leading role were all members of the generation that had received patriotic education during the Jiang Zemin era.
In China there is an old tale called “Master Dongguo.”
A scholar named Master Dongguo saved a dying wolf in the mountains that was being pursued by a hunter.
But instead of feeling gratitude, the wolf tried to attack Master Dongguo.
A farmer passing by then struck the wolf dead with a spade and lectured Master Dongguo that “one must not preach benevolence to a wolf.”
Almost all Chinese know this old tale, which even appears in elementary school textbooks.
Unlike Japanese folktales such as “The Crane’s Return of Favor,” which teach that “kind people are rewarded,” China teaches children, “Do not let sympathy be abused.”
The many things Japan did for the Communist regime after the Tiananmen Incident were probably, in the minds of Communist Party officials, objects of ridicule just like Master Dongguo.
With the recent U.S.-China confrontation, China is once again beginning to become isolated in the international community.
The situation is coming to resemble that which followed the Tiananmen Incident.
And China’s diplomacy, too, is once again beginning to shift toward Japan.
So as not to sadden democracy activists such as Wang Dan, Japan must never become Master Dongguo again.