A 10-year-old Japanese boy died in the early hours of Thursday in China after being stabbed on Wednesday morning. It was eight o’clock, he was going to school with his mother. He was 200 meters from the Japanese school he attended in the city of Shenzhen, a technological epicentre in the south of the country. The alleged perpetrator, a 44-year-old man, whose identity is unknown, but with a Chinese surname, Zhong, was arrested at the scene of the crime, according to the police.
Although a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman has said that this was an “isolated” case that could happen in any country, the parallels with another attack in June are notable. In that case, a Japanese child and his mother were stabbed by a Chinese citizen while they were waiting for the school bus in Suzhou, a city with a strong presence of Japanese companies and citizens, near Shanghai. The Japanese were saved, but the Chinese bus guard died in the incident, trying to defend them and restrain the attacker. A few weeks later, as this newspaper was able to verify, there was still strong police surveillance in the Japanese district of Suzhou, an indicator of the sensitivity of the matter. The motives for neither of these two attacks have yet been clarified.
“Teachings of hate for a long time”
On Thursday afternoon, people laid flowers outside the Japanese school in Shenzhen’s affluent Shekou area, which is home to most of the city’s foreign community and international schools. “As Chinese, we oppose this behaviour, we oppose hateful teachings,” a man who identified himself as an ordinary Shenzhen resident told Reuters. “Many of us have been under such hateful teachings for a long time, which has had dire consequences.”
The stabbing comes at a time of tense relations between Beijing and Tokyo, inflamed by nationalism, unhealed wounds from the past, unresolved territorial disputes and a renewed arms race. The stabbing coincided with China’s celebration of the 93rd anniversary of the so-called September 18 Incident, which triggered Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and opened the door to the Sino-Japanese War that followed.
Episodes such as the massacre committed by Japanese imperial troops in 1937 in Nanjing, then the capital of the People’s Republic, one of the most brutal and bloody episodes of that long conflict, are still very present in China. For six weeks, Japanese soldiers murdered more than 100,000 Chinese in an orgy of sadism (some sources put the figure at 300,000), with mass executions and tens of thousands of rapes.
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On Wednesday, the same day as the attack, the Japanese Ministry of Defense denounced what it called the first incursion into Japanese waters by a Chinese aircraft carrier and two destroyers. The area is close to the Senkaku Islands, controlled by Japan and claimed by China (which calls them Diaoyu). Beijing assured, through a foreign ministry spokesman, that the activities of its fleet were consistent with Chinese internal laws and international law. At the end of August, Tokyo had already condemned the violation of its airspace by a Chinese spy plane.
“I take the incident very seriously,” said Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa at a press conference on Thursday, where she confirmed the death of the child, whose mother is Japanese and whose father is Chinese. The child was hospitalised and underwent emergency surgery, but could not be saved. “This should never happen in any country. In particular, I sincerely regret that this despicable act was committed against a child on his way to school,” she added.
Japan has asked China for a detailed explanation of the incident and to take strong security measures, according to the minister. The Japanese embassy in the People’s Republic has stressed that this is a “serious” incident and has called on the Chinese government to do everything possible to protect Japanese citizens in the country. “The Chinese side will provide the necessary help to his family,” said Lin Jian, spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Attacks on Japanese schools
Anti-Japanese sentiment is still very much alive in the People’s Republic. Last summer, when Beijing and Tokyo clashed over the dumping of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea, which China strongly opposed, the aforementioned Japanese school in Suzhou was attacked with eggs; another Japanese school in Qingdao (Shandong province) was pelted with stones. And such incidents are not uncommon whenever a conflict flares up.
On Chinese social media, netizens complained Thursday that many comments about the murder were being censored, a sign in China that the issue is politically sensitive. Most of the messages that remain visible criticise the crime, especially because the victim was a child. After the stabbing in Suzhou in June, Chinese social media had already had to delete hundreds of ultra-nationalist messages. Some criticised the deceased Chinese woman for having helped Japanese citizens. Despite the tight internet lockdown in China, some comments were still visible days later. “She doesn’t represent me,” responded one Weibo user (the most popular social network in China) about his murdered compatriot, under a message of condolence from the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. “Why don’t you acknowledge the history of aggression against China?” complained another message.
Analyst and former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby, visiting the capital of the Asian giant, has described the event as “appalling” when questioned in a talk with foreign correspondents. “The Communist Party has constructed nationalism as a form of legitimacy,” he said. “But it is like riding a tiger. You cannot always control it in your own interest.”
The English edition of Global Timesthe internationally-oriented newspaper of the Chinese propaganda apparatus, opens its online edition on Thursday with an inflamed article on the celebrations of the September 18 incident. “Although the war ended long ago, recent events have revived concerns” about Japan, says a text criticizing the growing Japanese military budget, and its alleged “provocations” around Taiwan and the South China Sea. It also recalls the recent offering by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the controversial Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, built in homage to dead Japanese soldiers, among whom are convicted war criminals.
Victims of Japanese aggression, especially China and the Koreas, see visits to the shrine as an example of Japan’s lack of remorse. Kishida did not apologize this August for the atrocities committed, an omission that critics see as a whitewashing of past crimes. “We must remain vigilant against Japan’s moves to stoke geopolitical conflicts and fuel an arms race in the region,” one analyst concludes in the report. Global Times.
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