I like that headline, given to this opinion piece by one Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. I know a lot about Beijing’s current historical fantasies, but I didn’t know much about China’s “invasion” of India in 1962. (I use quote marks because I don’t know enough about it to call it a flat-out invasion.)

China has succeeded in putting the spotlight on Japan’s World War II history. But while harping on that distant war, Beijing refuses to face up to its own aggressions and employs revisionist history to rationalize its assertive claims and ambitions.

With fervent nationalism replacing Communist ideology, the scripted anti-Japanese mob protests earlier this year were one blatant case of the Chinese rulers’ open mixing of history with their politics. Another case in point occurred more recently at a seminar in Mumbai, after Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian defense minister, fleetingly cited the Chinese invasion of 1962 as a defining moment that set in motion India’s new thrust on defense production, and referred to the still-festering border problem with China, which he said had resolved its land-frontier disputes “with all its neighbors except India and Bhutan.”

In contravention of diplomatic norms, which would have involved consulting the Chinese ambassador in New Delhi, China’s Mumbai-based consul general castigated Mukherjee on the spot for using the term “invasion” and claimed that “China did not invade India.” Later, the ambassador, too, criticized Mukherjee’s reference to 1962, telling the Indian media, “Whatever happened in the past is history, and we want to put it back into history.”

The incident revealed how China contradictorily deals in history vis-à-vis its neighbors to further its own foreign policy objectives: While it wants India to forget 1962, it misses no opportunity to bash Japan over the head with the history card. Its aim is not to extract more apologies from Tokyo for its World War II atrocities but to continually shame and tame Japan. (It is ironic that visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao used Indian soil last April to demand that Japan “face up to history squarely,” setting the stage for his country’s orchestrated anti-Japanese protests.)

Another way China manipulates history is by reconstructing the past to prepare for the future. This was illustrated by the Chinese foreign ministry’s posting on its Web site last year a revised historical claim that the ancient kingdom of Koguryo, founded in northern Korea, was Chinese. This was seen as an attempt to hedge China’s options with a potentially unified Korea.

Then there is China’s continued use of what it presents as history to advance extravagant territorial or maritime claims. Its maps show an entire Indian state – Arunachal Pradesh – as well as other Indian areas as part of China.

While the Chinese-Japanese rivalry has deep roots, dating back to the 16th century, the Chinese and Indian military frontiers met for the first time in history only in 1950, when China annexed (or as its history books say, “liberated”) Tibet, a buffer nearly the size of Western Europe. Within 12 years of becoming India’s neighbor, China invaded this country, with Mao Zedong cleverly timing the aggression with the Cuban missile crisis.

Beijing has yet to grasp that a muscular approach is counterproductive. Had it not set out to “teach India a lesson,” in the words of then Premier Zhou Enlai, this country probably would not have become the significant military and nuclear power that it is today. The invasion helped lay the foundation of India’s political rise.

This has a reflection today. Just a decade ago, Beijing was content with a Japan that was pacifist, China-friendly and China’s main source of low-interest loans. Now, it is locked in a cold war with Tokyo, with its growing assertiveness and ambition spurring a politically resurgent Japan.

Even the Chinese consul general’s outburst has counterproductively returned the focus onto an invasion that Beijing wishes to eliminate from public discussion and about which it hides the truth from its own people. The impertinence only draws attention to the fact that China remains unapologetic for the major stab in the back that shattered India’s pacifism and hastened the death of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Japan certainly needs to come to terms with its brutal militaristic past. But just as Japanese textbooks and the museum attached to the Yasukuni Shrine glorify Japan’s past, Chinese textbooks and the military museum in Beijing distort and even falsify history. The key difference is that Chinese foreign policy seeks to make real the legend that drives official history – China’s centrality in the world.

I can’t comment on China and India. Judging from the tone of this piece, it’s quite conceivable that the writer has his own chip on his shoulder about China. But I can safely agree with every word in that last paragraph.

A strange story from our friends at Xinhua:

The LDS (Latter-day Saints) Foundation of the United States has agreed to investigate the “questionable” medical donations made to China following a request to do so by the All-China Federation of Charity, according to sources from the national charity organization.

“Most importantly, we want to know why there are problems with the donations,” the official from the federation was quoted as saying by the Beijing News.

Three containers of medical equipment reportedly donated to China by the Mormon Church or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City in November were found to have contained stained bedding, used surgical clothes and expired medical equipment.

Local quarantine inspectors discovered the contents after they were sent to charity organizations in Beijing, Hebei and Anhui provinces.

Normally I wouldn’t post such a trivial story (only 100 percent gravitas here), but Jesus’ General’s response – a letter to the Hong Kong Church of Latter Day Saints – was too good to pass up.

Richard Hunter
Hong Kong Media Contact
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons)

Dear Mr. Hunter,

I’ll never understand why brown people are so ungrateful. We provide them with death squads, ayatollahs to write their constitutions, air fare to the finest interrogation centers in Syria, Egypt, and the Eastern Bloc, and at Gitmo, indefinite detention and pain slightly less than that which accompanies organ failure and they return our generosity by shooting at our troops (none of whom are College Republicans, thank God).

I see the Church is experiencing much the same thing in your part of the world. You sent the Chinese soiled bedding, used surgical scrubs, and outdated medical equipment and they bitched about it. What did they expect? Clean bedding, sterile scrubs, and modern medical equipment costs money. They’re in no position to complain. If God wanted them to have these things, he’d have made them American.

So a few people get infected by the items you sent them. What’s the worse that can happen? They could die? Well, that just gives us an opportunity to baptize, marry, and provide them with their endowments* by proxy. They’ll thank us when they’re ruling over their own universes in the Celestial Kingdom.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

*Secret handshakes that will get you into heaven.

The General’s letter is filled with delicious links that I’m too tired to copy here; if you have issues with the Mormon cult, you’ll want to check it out.

I think we have a serious mess on our hands, and the CCP realizes that.

The commander of paramilitary forces who opened fire on villagers protesting land seizures has been detained by the authorities in connection with the shootings, an extraordinary response that suggested high-level concern over whether the crackdown was justified.

The official New China News Agency said in a dispatch Saturday evening that three people had been killed and eight others injured after security forces shot protesters in the village of Dongzhou in Guangdong Province on Tuesday. Villagers have given varying estimates of the death toll, including some who said as many as 20 people had been killed.

Guangdong’s provincial government issued a statement Sunday saying that the “wrong actions” of the commander, who was not identified by unit or rank, were to blame for the deaths. The statement said he had been detained by civilian authorities in the area.

An earlier official account quoting local authorities laid blame for the violence exclusively on villagers. It said local residents, led by three men, first attacked a power plant at the center of a land dispute and then turned on the police, using weapons including spears, knives and dynamite, compelling security forces to put down the insurrection forcibly.

The whole thing is extraordinary. Hundreds of riots occur in China every day, but, as the article says, police and paramilitary forces rarely shoot civilian demonstrators. Xinhua, as I posted yesterday, put out a lengthy article claiming it was all about thuggish “instigators” who were wickedly inciting the villagers, who the poor law enforecement officials were “forced” to shoot down. And within 12 hours, that Xinhua article vanished. Somewhere within that period of time someone in the government apparently realized just how serious a mess this was, and that trying to scapegoat the demonstrators wasn;t going to work.

Meanwhile, since the Xinhua article came and went, there seems to be a blackout on news coming out of China; a Google News search shows it’s only the foreign press that’s covering it (with plenty of sensational coverage from Epoch Times, of course).

In the NYT article, Joseph Kahn notes,

Several Guangzhou newspapers have had reports about the matter, but national newspapers and Web sites have not even carried the New China News Agency report, suggesting extreme sensitivity on how people will react to the shootings.

Murray Scot Tanner, an expert on China’s security forces at the Rand Corporation, said Monday that the detention of a commander could signal fears that Chinese press reports about the incident may not be treated as credible. He said the authorities are highly reluctant to assign blame to police or paramilitary troops and almost never do so.

Chinese press reports, not credible? Imagine that. It’ll be so interesting to learn what’s really going on, and why the Party is so terrified.

Update: Daai Tou Laam has been doing a fine job covering this story. His withering critique of another blogger’s coverage of the story is certainly thought-provoking, as well.

And it doesn’t disappoint. Check it out now.

Yes, I think it definitely qualifies. Oh, and it’s in Beijing.

Via GI Korea.

That’s the headline of a new article in Time magazine on a topic we all know and love. And it’s quite an article.

You don’t have to look far to see why Chinese grow up learning to hate Japan. Take the forthcoming children’s movie, “Little Soldier Zhang,” which Beijing-based director Sun Lijun says he made having “learned a lot from Disney.” The film chronicles the adventures in the 1930s of Little Zhang, a cute 12-year-old boy feeling his way through an unfriendly world. But the resemblance to Pinocchio ends there. After Japanese invaders shoot Little Zhang’s grandmother in the back, the boy seeks revenge by joining an underground Red Army detachment. He moves among heroic Chinese patriots, sniveling collaborators and sadistic Japanese. The finale comes with Little Zhang helping blow up a trainload of Japanese soldiers and receiving a cherished reward: a pistol with which to kill more Japanese. “I thought about including one sympathetic Japanese character, but this is an anti-Japan war movie and I don’t want to confuse anyone,” says Sun, who will premier his film on International Children’s Day.

Chinese kids can be forgiven for thinking Japan is a nation of “devils,” a slur used without embarrassment in polite Chinese society. They were raised to feel that way, and not just through cartoons. Starting in elementary school children learn reading, writing and the “Education in National Humiliation.” This last curriculum teaches that Japanese “bandits” brutalized China throughout the 1930s and would do so today given half a chance. Although European colonial powers receive their share of censure, the main goal is keeping memories of Japanese conquest fresh. Thousands of students each day, for instance, take class trips to the Anti-Japanese War Museum in Beijing to view grainy photos of war atrocities — women raped and disemboweled, corpses of children stacked like cordwood. As one 15-year-old girl in a blue and yellow school uniform, Ji Jilan, emerged from a recent visit to the gallery, she told a TIME correspondent: “After seeing this, I hate Japanese more than ever.”

There’s lots more, including the usual observation that the government goes to extreme lengths to keep stoking the flames of anti-Japan propaganda, mainly to keep the focus off of its own failures and malfeasances, and that as long as the CCP lacks legitimacy, it has little choice but to keep the tired game going.

This is via CDT, which notes:

China Daily has posted an edited version of this article with the title “Chinese don’t love to hate Japanese; Due repentance urged.”

Check out the China Daily sanitized version, which skillfully weeds out all allusions to a central theme of the article, i.e., that China’s obsession with hating Japan is government-fomented for self-preserving political purpses.

It’s refreshing to see the left and right sides of the blogosphere join one another to protest a racist, judicially insane perversion of the law. Every blogger should be speaking out. It’s exactly the sort of story that gives the CCP trolls in here an opportunity to say, “See! The US system is just as bad as China’s!” Let’s show the world that they’re wrong, and that Americans won’t tolerate old-school racist “Southern justice.”

cross-posted at the paper tiger

The LA Times files its report on Dongzhou today. Much of the information is similar to the accounts posted below. But the story asks an essential question, the answer to which I believe will profoundly affect China’s immediate future – and specifically, the future of the Hu/Wen administration and perhaps the CCP’s continued monopoly on political power:

Residents said the police who opened fired Tuesday appeared to be from the area, but reinforcements sent later were outsiders equipped with armor, shields and machine guns. Experts said it was unclear whether local police had panicked and exceeded their authority, or whether there had been a policy shift by the central government.

“Part of the pattern is continued tension and inadequate central control over local governments,” said Sharon Hom, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights in China. “This doesn’t take Beijing off the hook, but there are tensions between local police and other arms of government. It’s not a monolith.”

Jean-Philippe Beja, a senor fellow with the Paris-based Center for International Studies and Research, said the central government usually opposes strong shows of force. But indications are that Beijing also gave more authority to local officials to deal with unrest after villagers in Taishi, also in Guangdong province, tried to eject a local official over corruption charges.

If this is yet another case of a corrupt, out-of-control local government that the central government has been unable to bring to heel, well, then Hu and Wen still have some time to make good on their promises of greater “social harmony” and bringing some economic justice to the rural masses who have been left behind by China’s “Economic Miracle.” But if this escalated use of deadly force comes as a result of a policy change by the central government…

Well, then Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen had better prepare themselves for a very bumpy ride. And perhaps a rather short ride as well.

No regime in China has been able to survive very long or very well if it loses the support of the peasant masses. By the Chinese government’s own account, there were around 76,000 significant demonstrations in China last year, which if nothing else, indicates an increasingly desperate – and emboldened – population. There aren’t enough police, there aren’t enough soldiers, and empty promises have lost their power to pacify the millions of Chinese who have very little to lose, who are quickly adopting modern organizing tools and are able to communicate with others across distances who feel as they do.

Hu has made things worse for himself by cracking down on China’s media, which could at least give honest reports on local problems about which the central government would otherwise be unaware (I know that there is some debate as to whether this crackdown is Hu’s doing or the remnants of that bad old Shanghai clique, and I’ll hold that possiblity open). Hamfisted, violent responses to poor people with legitimate grievances open the door to levels of chaos which China has not seen in a long time.

I can’t say this scenario is something that I would celebrate, because the pain and misery which are likely to result would be staggering. And if the current regime were to collapse, what would rise in its place?

UPDATE: I was in somewhat of an apocalyptic mood when I wrote this. As those following this issue closely know, apparently the Guangdong official who ordered the use of live fire has been arrested:

The official Guangzhou Daily newspaper did not give the name or title of the official or specify when he had been detained but said he had been arrested for his decision to open fire on the villagers’ demonstration.

As usual, whenever I am tempted to make any inflated pronouncements on what’s happening in China and what is likely to happen in the future, I’m forced to fall back on Premier Zhou Enlai’s assessment of the French Revolution: “It’s too soon to tell.”

(hat tip to Dylan and Sun Bin for the update)

This article offers an interesting peephole into a most mysterious aspect of Japanese culture, with interviews with real Geishas (“Geiko” is actually the correct term, they say) who see the new film Memoirs of a Geisha giving the world an unfair and innacurate picture of what being a Geiko is all about.

Co-produced by Steven Spielberg, the movie tells of a little girl from a poor fishing village who is sold to a Gion geisha house and achieves legendary status, secretly falling in love on the way with a rich businessman.

The book was criticized by its subject, former geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who accused Golden of making the legendary Japanese hostesses seem like prostitutes.

For the “geiko” of Gion, their profession is far more nuanced. Some past geishas in other districts offered sex and the geiko say that foreigners often mistake them for prostitutes because of their showy outfits.

The geiko believe they are far different, preserving a sophisticated tradition and creating a fantasy world in which modern concepts such as gender equality have yet to enter.

As soon as they finish Japan’s compulsory education at the age of 15, girls in Gion start training in the performing arts, gracious social etiquette and conversation skills, which all will be necessary when they host customers at a tea house’s hosting room.

They are soon called “maiko” — dancing girls. Becoming more skilled in dancing and performing musical instruments, usually around age 20, they finally assume the title of geiko.

Mamehiro, now 36, moved into a geiko house upon graduation from middle school, just like the around 90 other geiko currently serving in Gion, and went through an apprenticeship for five years to learn the social graces.

“One tough thing in the process of becoming a full-fledged geiko is to eat meals in other people’s house,” she says, referring to the apprenticeship. “A geiko house brings you up as if you were a child of the house.”

The aspiring geikos learn how to show respect to the elder girls and the mother of the house. Phrases such as “Excuse me for taking a bath before you” and “Excuse me for going before you” into a hallway become second nature.

Excerpting from this article doesn’t really work – you have to read it all. Every paragraph has something worth quoting.

The next two weeks are going to be exceptionally bad, so expect more threads, less writing. Will try to compensate on the weekends.