Another attack on a Japanese local points to a big problem in China

A tragedy like this “could have happened in any country”, said China’s foreign-ministry spokesman on September 19th. A day earlier, in the southern city of Shenzhen, a Chinese man had stabbed a ten-year-old Japanese boy while he was on his way to school. The boy later died from his injuries. The assailant was arrested at the scene. The authorities have released no information about his motives.

The attack was strikingly similar to another, which also happened in China. In June a Japanese woman and her child were assaulted at a bus stop near a school in Suzhou, a city to the west of Shanghai, by a Chinese man wielding a knife. They were injured and a Chinese woman was killed after reportedly stepping in to protect them. This, too, was an isolated incident, according to China’s government.

But many see a link between the attacks: anti-Japanese xenophobia. Chinese schools stir up resentment of Japan over its invasion of China and the atrocities it committed in the 1930s and 40s. (Some note that the attack in Shenzhen occurred on the date of the Mukden Incident, when Japan faked an explosion in north-east China to justify its invasion.) “The evil seeds planted by the Japanese back then have borne an evil fruit,” said a commentator on Weibo, a microblogging site. “The real murderers are the Japanese themselves.”

To be sure, many Chinese have expressed sympathy for the child’s family and anger at the rise of extreme nationalism online. But the anti-Japanese vitriol spouted by nationalists is generally tolerated by the state. They get riled when Japanese politicians express support for Taiwan or when they visit Yasukuni, a Tokyo shrine to Japan’s war dead, including war criminals. The Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands, which China claims and calls the Diaoyu, are another sore point.

That vitriol has also been aimed at Japanese-language schools, near which both attacks occurred. China has a dozen or so of these schools. The Economist found that hundreds of videos about them had been posted on Douyin, a popular short-video app, between late 2021 and September of this year. One, which had over 100,000 views, called them part of a “cultural invasion”. Others spread a theory that the schools are training spies. According to our number-crunching, videos that railed against the schools attracted twice as many likes as those that did not.

All this has rattled the Japanese community in China, which had already been shrinking (see chart). In July the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in China released a survey of its members. Several said more efforts were needed to keep Japanese citizens safe. Now schools are advising Japanese children to stop speaking their mother tongue in public. Panasonic, a Japanese electronics giant, is offering to pay for employees and their families based in China to return temporarily to Japan. Other companies are considering doing the same.

Japan has demanded more information about the boy’s death. The incident has become a talking-point in the contest to lead the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which will, in effect, decide who becomes Japan’s next prime minister. Some candidates say China’s government, which censors content it deems undesirable, is partly to blame for the violence because it has allowed anti-Japanese sentiment to spread. In a meeting with her Chinese counterpart on September 23rd, Kamikawa Yoko, Japan’s foreign minister and a candidate to be the LDP’s chief, pressed China to curb online hate.

For its part, the Chinese government seems to want better relations with Japan. It recently ended a spat between the countries. China had protested against Japan’s discharge of radioactive water into the sea from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant. Experts said Japan’s actions were safe, but China banned seafood imports from the country. Now China says it will gradually lift the ban if the contaminated water is independently monitored.

The Chinese government, though, has done little to rein in the nationalists. They are some of the Communist Party’s strongest backers. And complaints about Japan distract from the ailing economy. “What Japan did to China during the war was so terrible,” says a Japanese woman in Beijing. But now, “hatred of Japan is used as a way of venting general dissatisfaction.” ■

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