April 16, 2005 The Brave China Man
The Chinese are funny. For the last fifty years, their government spends their time lying to them wholesale, killing a million or so of their own people through economic mismanagement, potentially a few hundred thousand through the odd political purges that were in vogue, and happily bulldozes their heritage to make way for greedy little tycoons to make even more money from their lucrative party positions. Furthermore, the last twenty years of economic growth, enterprising capitalist Chinese have happily been exploiting workers to gain a competitive advantage over the rest of the world’s poorer nations.
Apparently the Japanese should be the ones held to account by the “man on the street” in China. Nanking? Perhaps one should compare the figures of who killed how many. Comfort girls? Yep, that was bad, but there are still one or two prominent Chinese associations that still float around today that reaped the benefits from supplying Japanese occupiers with the fresh source of women.
All these China men are so brave when it comes to beating up helpless Japanese signs for restaurants that probably employ only Chinese staff. When it comes to challenging the lies, corruption and dominance of Beijing, let’s see how brave you are then. Tiananmen was a long time ago.
Tags: Political Thoughts
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kipper
said
You posted about this story earlier too. Still not sure what it’s about…
Can you explain it to someone stuck out in the Far West?
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Eshin
said
The Japanese have released a revised textbook published by a right-wing group for use in about 0.1% of schools in Japan that basically contains factual errors, omissions and distortions about the Japanese activities during World War II.
Things like the Nanking Massacre where wholesale execution of the local populace and where women were raped en masse are still a sore point for the Chinese. The Japanese also conducted biological experiments in some parts of China.
The revised textbooks omit these details, and sometimes even put the blame for the Sino-Japanese war at the foot of the Chinese.
And of course, there is still the lingering issue over the comfort women that were enslaved during the Japanese occupation.
Usually, it’s a yearly protest about the failure of Japan to apologise for its war crimes and the fact that the Japanese prime minister visits the shrines where Japanese Class A war criminals are buried and honored. But this time its the textbook that has fueled the apparent riots in China.
Understandable grievances but it doesn’t justify the destruction of property, sacking of stores that have Japanese products, and intimidating Japanese with China. In a modern civilized society, this sort of xenophobic, civil disobedience has no place. If China doesn’t want the world to look at it backward, it needs to a lid on these acts of mob thuggery.