China steps up propaganda war on Japan
China has embarked on a major propaganda campaign, including plans to mark the 'rape of Nanjing' in new national holiday, to discredit Japan on the world stage
China has stepped up its efforts to embarrass Japan on the world stage with plans for a new holiday to mark the Nanjing massacre and an attempt to make the Second World War a central theme of a presidential trip to Germany next month.
Beijing is waging a major propaganda war against Tokyo, using the media to contrast Germany's atonement for the war to what Beijing sees as Japan's failure to adequately apologise for its role in Second World War including the 1937 Nanjing massacre.
The Chinese "really are going for it in a big way", said Rana Mitter, a University of Oxford professor and the author of China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival.
On Wednesday, state media revealed plans for two new national holidays; one to mark victory day over Japan and another to remember what became known as the "rape of Nanjing."
China's increasingly forceful anti-Japan campaign has seen the government organise two propaganda tours for the foreign media this year.
In January, reporters were taken to the site of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in northeast China.
Last week, officials guided journalists including one from the The Daily Telegraph around Nanjing, the former Chinese capital. Beijing claims around 300,000 people were killed there following a Japanese invasion in 1937. An international post-war tribunal put the number at 142,000.
During the two-day tour, Communist Party officials and academics made continuous allusions to the Holocaust. Reporters were also taken to the former home of John Rabe, a Nanjing-based member of the Nazi party, who sheltered hundreds of Chinese refugees in his home's air raid shelter.
"This massacre was brutal and should not happen again in the future. It is just the same as the Holocaust in Auschwitz," said Zhu Chengshan, the curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.
"The more I learn about this part of history, the more angry I become.
Japan should first acknowledge history. Then we can talk about a way forward."
Xu Jingjing, a museum guide, ushered reporters through a dimly-lit exhibit filled with gruesome black-and-white images of burned and mutilated bodies entitled, "A Human Holocaust".
"We've looked at the mass massacres, now let's look at the random killings," she said, moving into a room featuring a photograph of a Chinese man who had been decapitated by Japanese troops before having a cigarette stuffed into his mouth.
Officials also arranged an interview with an octogenarian survivor of the massacre called Xia Shuqin who recounted witnessing the Japanese slaughter of her family.
"My mother and my little sister were both killed by Japanese soldiers," she said, occasionally wiping tears from her eyes with a white handkerchief.
"They shot my grandparents. The blood was all over the wall."
Xi Jinping, China's president, is set to visit Germany in late March as part of a European tour that also includes stops in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, Reuters reported on Monday.
The trip has yet to be formally announced and there has been no official word as to why Beijing wants to emphasise wartime issues, including a suggested presidential visit to Berlin's Holocaust Memorial.
However, Chinese leaders almost certainly hope to indirectly attack Japan by evoking memories of the Second World War.
Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have deteriorated rapidly in recent months both because of escalating frictions over disputed islands in the East China Sea - known in China as the Diaoyu and in Japan as Senkaku - and the toxic legacy of Japan's military exploits in 1930s China.
Japan's leaders have repeatedly expressed regret for their wartime actions in Asia including a landmark 1995 apology by Tomiichi Murayama, the prime minister. He sought forgiveness for the "tremendous damage and suffering" caused by Japanese troops in the region.
However, such statements have been undermined by conservative politicians and academics who have downplayed or denied the Nanjing massacre. Last month, Naoki Hyakuta, a board member of NHK, Japan's state television broadcaster, sparked fury in Beijing by claiming it had "never happened."
"We doubt the sincerity of the Japanese apology," said Mr Zhu, the Nanjing memorial curator. "Sorry is not enough for China in this matter."
Gu Junli, a professor from the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, said Beijing believed Germany could serve as a good example for Japan of "introspection, apology and compensation".
A visit to Berlin's Holocaust Memorial by Xi Jinping would simultaneously allow China to express its respect for Germany's responsible post-war stance and its anger over how Japan has "distorted" history, he argued.
However, Germany "immediately" rejected the idea of a visit to the memorial. "The Holocaust is a no-go area," one diplomatic source told Retuers.
German diplomats told Beijing they did not want "the negative legacy of the war" to dominate the visit or to be "dragged into" China's dispute with Japan.
Prof Mitter said it was "unarguable" that the West had never fully recognised Chinese suffering during the war years and pointed to the 14 million Chinese deaths and 100 million refugees.
"If the Chinese had surrendered to the Japanese in 1938, a year after the war broke out between China and Japan, then essentially you have a pacified China which would have been part of the Japanese empire, maybe for decades, and everything from the Soviet Union to British India to South East Asia would have been vulnerable to Japan much earlier."
However, Beijing's recent attempts to revive public debate of China's role in the Second World War were about geopolitics as much as history. "It's essentially about using the legacy of 1945 to press claims in the 2010s," said Prof Mitter.
"The Chinese authorities are seeking to draw a particular lesson from this: that because of the sacrifice that was made during the war therefore China is owed certain concessions by the Asia-Pacific region as a whole and by Japan in particular," he said. "In Chinese logic it makes sense. But from the wider region's point of view the argument that Chinese is entitled to further territorial concessions because of World War Two isn't something that is necessarily evident."
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