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.
Japan and the United States Nurtured the Monstrous State That China Has Become
Liu
Why did Japan fail to see China’s true nature at the time of the Tiananmen Square incident?
As Ms. Ako says, it was none other than Japan and the United States that nurtured the monstrous state that China has become today.
Tan
The problem is that although Japan provided China with enormous amounts of official development assistance (ODA), ordinary Chinese people do not know that they received support through ODA.
Financial assistance from Japan and the United States, together with joint ventures established through the combined efforts of their public and private sectors, brought investment from around the world into China and enabled its economic growth, but China has forgotten that.
Chinese people believe that China’s economic development was achieved through their own efforts.
That is why Japan should do more to publicize its contributions.
Ako
I actually worked on ODA at the Japanese embassy in China, and Japan concentrated on buildings and facilities.
Influenced by a view of history centered on atonement for the war, Japan was so afraid of interfering in China’s internal affairs that it simply handed money to the Chinese government and left it at that.
When building a school, for example, we should also have developed the substance of its education as part of the same package—what would be taught there and how its teachers would be trained—but we did almost none of that.
That is why ordinary Chinese people do not know that Japan provided ODA.
Tan
Japan has kept repeating the same mistakes.
In the 1920s, countries around the world returned to China the indemnities for the Boxer Rebellion, which had occurred during the Qing dynasty, but the United States established schools in China, enrolled students it had selected, and sent them to study in the United States and earn doctorates.
Those who returned with doctorates became university professors and taught the next generation, “We owe a debt of gratitude to the United States. America is a wonderful country.”
So the next generation also thinks America is wonderful.
Japan, however, returned part of the indemnity payments to the Chinese government and left the selection of students to that government before bringing them to Japan to study.
Consequently, the students did not know that the funding came from Japan and felt no gratitude toward Japan at all.
Japan also used most of the returned funds to establish research institutions in Beijing and Shanghai, dispatched Japanese researchers from Japan, and immersed itself in research on China without involving Chinese people.
As a result, those institutions were regarded with suspicion and rejected.
If we are going to spend the same money, surely it is better to put it to effective use, as the United States did.
We should invest in people rather than facilities and institutions.
Ako
The West does, after all, have a Christian foundation and a well-established awareness of human rights.
Japan, however, was so intent on separating politics from economics that it thought economic success was all that mattered and made no effort to nurture the human qualities beneath it.
Yang
In fact, most of Japan’s ODA went into bureaucrats’ pockets, and most Chinese people who have succeeded in business in Japan are those bureaucrats’ relatives or people connected to their support networks.
Ako
Having actually been responsible for this work, I know that sad reality all too well.
Even when Chinese people feel grateful, their gratitude goes to Chinese politicians and officials connected to the Japanese politicians who helped arrange the ODA, rather than to Japan.
It Is Time for Japan to Speak Up to China!
Liu
The “foundations for democracy” in the United States and Taiwan support Chinese human rights lawyers and others, and I have been asked so often that I am tired of hearing it, “Why does Japan, Asia’s largest democracy, not have a foundation for democracy?”
Japan should establish one too.
Liu Xiaobo advocated a shift from “interest-based diplomacy” to “values-based diplomacy.”
His point was that Japan, as an economic power, bears an important responsibility for Asia’s economic development and, as Asia’s most mature major democracy politically, should also take the leading role, as a moral responsibility, in advancing Asia’s social transformation and political democratization.
The Chinese Communist Party has been in power for more than seventy years, yet Japan keeps apologizing indefinitely.
Nothing can begin that way.
Ako
Surely Japan cannot simply look on at people being persecuted by the Chinese government and do no more than feel sorry for them.
We are called upon to think concretely and act for democracy.
Yang
As pressure on China intensifies around the world, what will Japan do?
If we are going to stand up, now is the time.
Tan
At the sixth special session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, Deng Xiaoping made the following statement.
“If China should one day change its character, become a superpower, and seek world hegemony, bullying, invading, and exploiting other countries everywhere, then the people of the world should denounce China as ‘social-imperialist,’ expose China’s wrongdoing, oppose China, and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”
Now is the time for Japan to exercise leadership, work together with countries around the world and Chinese people in distress, and speak firmly to China for the sake of a brighter future for Japan-China relations.