2022-11-30
The following is from a special roundtable discussion published in the January 2023 issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, released on November 25, 2022, under the title “I Want to Curse It to Death—Xi Jinping’s Dictatorship!”, featuring four participants: Tomoko Ako, Professor at the University of Tokyo; Lumei Tan, writer; Yi Yang, writer; and Yanzi Liu, scholar of Chinese literature.
As I have mentioned repeatedly, WiLL and Hanada cost just 980 yen despite being packed with substantive articles!
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that they are currently the finest monthly magazines in the world.
This article is essential reading not only for every Japanese citizen but also for people throughout the world.
It is essential reading for everyone, young and old, men and women, and especially for all young people.
Some passages already foreshadowed the developments now taking place in China.
Emphasis within the text, other than in the headings, is mine.
Chinese People Do Not Truly Awaken
Liu
I, too, grew up hearing songs praising Mao Zedong and slogans glorifying communism, and even now, when I hear those melodies, I find myself humming along, and my body starts moving of its own accord.
That is how frightening indoctrination is.
Yang
Exactly.
That is why, even after waking from what Lu Xun called “dozing,” Chinese people do not truly awaken.
Among Chinese people who, like me, have been in Japan for more than thirty years, quite a few continue to live within Japan’s Chinese community, even though they came to Japan seeking freedom.
They have little contact with Japanese people in either their daily lives or their work, and they cannot speak Japanese fluently.
Their understanding of democracy seems no different from the concept taught in Chinese schools.
I doubt whether such democracy activists could build a truly democratic country in China, and I suspect that even if they gained power, they would be little different from Xi Jinping.
Liu
Now, more than forty years after Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up began, countless Chinese people have studied abroad and returned to China, yet they have done nothing to advance China’s politics or develop its democracy.
Even when they go to Japan or the United States, they merely learn technical skills and return home without giving freedom or democracy a second glance.
Yang
Many Chinese people who live abroad and integrate into local life and culture—who have genuinely “moved beyond Chinese society”—may have little desire for benefits tied to China and little interest in politics.
I think we should hold courses on such topics as “What Are Human Rights?,” “What Is History?,” “What Is a Constitution?,” and “What Is a Citizen?” to teach democratic values to Chinese people who “live parasitically” within Chinese communities, as well as to students newly arriving from China.
The Root Cause Is “National Humiliation Education”
Tan
We spoke earlier about indoctrination, but Chinese people have a “consciousness of national humiliation”: they regard foreign invasions during wars as a “national humiliation” and believe that this humiliation must never be forgotten.
In this context, there is the “nine-dash line,” consisting of nine boundary segments that China unilaterally drew on a map to assert its territorial claims in the South China Sea.
When Wang Chong, a Chinese professor at an American university, was invited to give a lecture at a university in Beijing, he reportedly asked, “Do you think the nine-dash line is correct?” and every student answered, “Yes.”
To check this for myself, I asked a Chinese professor at a prominent Japanese university, “Do you think the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea are Chinese territory?”
He replied apologetically, “I cannot say this too openly, but… deep down, I do.”
The professor was in his forties, a sincere, highly cultured researcher whom everyone liked.
I also asked several Chinese international students in their twenties and thirties, and they said, “In China, we were taught this from elementary school onward, and we saw and heard on television and in newspapers that they belonged to China.
After coming to Japan to study, we learned that there were other ways of thinking, but it is difficult to change our minds about what we were taught from childhood.”
I do not think every Chinese student in Japan believes in the nine-dash line, but even if China launched a military invasion of the Senkaku Islands, quite a few Chinese people living in Japan would support it.
In fact, James Shoal in the Spratly Islands, which China claims marks the southernmost extent of the nine-dash line, is a submerged reef and is not recognized as an “island” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; consequently, it cannot serve as the basis for a claim to territorial waters.
They have not studied the subject sufficiently and do not even know such facts.
No matter how fine the Japanese teachers who teach them democracy, or what books they have them read, Chinese students do not truly awaken.
This is a very difficult problem.
Ako
I share those pessimistic views of aspects of China, but I want to find some way to change the present situation for the better.
Most of my graduate students come from China, and when they interact with public intellectuals who can no longer work as journalists or publish books in China, they are profoundly shaken.
Through such activities, I want to convey the merits of democracy to Chinese people.
Since the days of Sun Yat-sen, Japan has sought to bring positive influences to China and change it, and I believe that Japan, in particular, can change China for the better.
At the beginning, Ms. Liu said that a friend of hers had said, “I want to cut off this arm through which Chinese blood flows,” and that is a terribly sad story.
It is wrong, after all, to lump people together as Chinese on the basis of ethnicity and exclude them.
Certainly, the current Communist Party regime has many problems, but I believe that even people of Chinese ancestry can come to see a variety of values by living in Japan.
Conversely, if we speak of China as though it were the villain, we end up treating the issue as someone else’s problem and cannot have a positive influence on them.
Tan
I write books mainly about modern and contemporary Japanese and Chinese history, and in the past, Japanese educators such as Jigoro Kano influenced China from the same standpoint as Ms. Ako.
Dr. Toru Terao, a professor of law at Tokyo Imperial University, also made an enormous contribution to Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, even at the cost of his own pension.
Liu
Ms. Ako’s steady, dedicated efforts are a light in the darkness.
I myself was born and raised in China and encountered freedom after coming to Japan, but it took me thirty years before I could finally shake off the poison.
To be continued.