Sino-Japanese relations are riddled with scabs aplenty, and flesh wounds run viscous and deep.
Chest thumping over Japan’s real and imagined threats are not new, they have run deep since proto-nationalism in the late 1800s.
They have paid a huge cost for failing to stand up to Japan, many times in living memory for many. They will not want a repeat of losing and then having to foot the victor’s repair bill, stripping itself of means to rebuild.
Of wider note then was Chinese resistance against foreign domination that culminated in the Battle of Peking. The guns ablazing Eight-Nation Alliance made China pay them $335 million (over $4 billion in current dollars) plus interest over a period of 39 years in 1901. It is hard to find breakdowns and how much goes to, who online. However, I found them in a visit to Sun Yat Sen’s former HQ in Singapore.
The world has to be realistic. There is no reason to believe the Chinese are preparing to be defeated on this one. Give and take on smaller issues yes, but when it comes to territorial disputes, I think no chance will be given. Its maritime force is not battle tested, and will itch for battle test-worthiness.
As for the central message behind the article below, it is noteworthy how China conducts its domestic charm offensive, through making cultural capital one of its to eight priorities for this phase of rise.
Perhaps it is unsurprising the us and them perceptual tendency is being amplified by broadcast media. Only this time it isn’t one-message fits all push propaganda like the Mao era. This is now a plethora of choice with 1.3b individuals with a developing sense of identity.
The state is going all out to build an effective dominant ideology stemming intertextually through a massive media ecology on a scale the world has never seen. And through that, the modernist Chinese identity is adapting contemporary values as China’s rise and place in the world shapes its view of itself, and how it sees itself in the world. One only has to visit China and just spend a day channel surfing, to see for oneself.
The tensions and the propaganda go far beyond the current spat. Underneath it all lies a struggle for power and influence in Asia between China and Japan – and political struggles within China itself. Many China watchers believe Beijing’s leaders nurture anti-Japanese hatred to bolster their own legitimacy, which is coming under question among citizens livid over problems ranging from official corruption to rampant environmental pollution. David Lague and Jane Lanhee Lee
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Special Report: Why China’s film makers love to hate Japan
By David Lague and Jane Lanhee Lee
Source – Reuters, published Hengdian, China | Sat May 25, 2013
(Reuters) – Shi Zhongpeng dies for a living. For 3,000 yuan ($488) a month, the sturdily built stuntman is killed over and over playing Japanese soldiers in war movies and TV series churned out by Chinese film studios.
Despite his lack of dramatic range, the 23-year-old’s roles have made him a minor celebrity in China. Once, Shi says, he perished 31 times in a single day of battle. On the set of the television drama “Warning Smoke Everywhere,” which has just finished shooting here at the sprawling Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang Province, he suffers a typically grisly fate.
“I play a shameful Japanese soldier in a way that when people watch, they feel he deserves to die,” Shi says. “I get bombed in the end.”
For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan’s brutal 14-year occupation, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.
Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 anti-Japanese films were made last year.
Please click here to read the full report at Reuters.
Filed under: Beijing Consensus, Charm Offensive, Chinese Model, Collectivism, Communications, Culture, Democracy, Domestic Growth, Education, Entertainment, Government & Policy, Ideology, Influence, Infrastructure, Intellectual Property, International Relations, japan, Lifestyle, Mapping Feelings, Media, military, Modernisation, Nationalism, New Leadership, Peaceful Development, Politics, Public Diplomacy, Reform, Reuters, Social, Soft Power, Strategy, Tao Guang Yang Hui (韬光养晦), The Chinese Identity, The construction of Chinese and Non-Chinese identities
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