Barely three months after a knife-wielding assailant tried to attack Japanese children outside their school bus in Suzhou, a 10-year-old Japanese was fatally stabbed outside his school in Shenzhen. Authorities insist that both are isolated incidents, but nobody is buying that. A strong statement issued by Chinese intellectuals living in Japan ascribes the incidents to “the extreme nationalism and anti-Japanese education that has long prevailed in China, (which) have obscured some Chinese people’s understanding of Japan and even indulged ignorance and evil.”
The latest attack took place on September 18, a date the Chinese are never allowed to forget. It marks the start of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, an occupation that lasted 14 years. Observed as National Humiliation Day, it’s marked with sirens blaring and rallies carrying anti-Japanese banners.
The occupation of China by imperialist powers, referred to as the ‘century of humiliation’, naturally has to be a part of the school curriculum. Announcing the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, Chairman Mao had declared: “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.” While it is logical for students to be taught that the Communist Party of China brought the century of humiliation to an end, what alarms some intellectuals is that this history has now become a narrative of victimhood, kept alive and used by the CPC in any conflict with the Westand Japan.
Significantly, Japanese schools, meant for children of Japanese expats, are special targets of online hate. Did these sentiments drive the assailants in both incidents? Unfortunately, though they have been arrested, not much has been reported about them. Indeed, the official media’s silence on the latest killing is shocking. The June 24 Suzhou incident was widely reported because the school’s bus attendant, a middle-aged Chinese, stopped the assailant and, while doing so, lost her own life. But reports of this latest incident, including those emanating from Japan, were quickly scrubbed off the internet. The first police report did not even mention the boy’s nationality or the attack site. Official reports started appearing only after a foreign affairs spokesman held a press conference later that day, and then, they parroted the official “isolated incident” version.
While the victim’s father is Japanese, his mother is Chinese. In a moving letter, the boy’s father, describing his son as “both Japanese and Chinese”, with “a heart more gentle than anyone”, regrets that he would never get to see his son grow. Yet, he says, “we will not hate China, nor will we hate Japan.” “Fostering understanding” between the two countries, he writes, would be “my way of atoning for my son, and my form of retribution against the perpetrator.”
His anguish was echoed by the ordinary Shenzhen mothers who lined up to lay flowers outside the boy’s school, calling him “a child of Shenzhen”. Others said sorry on social media posts.
Shenzhen was the first city to open up to the West in 1980 under Deng Xiaoping. Ironically, Deng had specially requested Japanese companies to invest, and the first Japanese company started operations in 1983 in the city’s Shekou Industrial Zone. The victim’s school too lies in Shekou. Known as China’s most modern city, Shenzhen would not have reached this status without the immigrants who live in it, many residents have written on social media. “The death of this Shenzhen child actually challenges the core values of this city and is destroying the high-rise buildings,” was one comment, while a retired employee of Shekou Industrial Zone posted: “It is a shame for a nation to lose the basic bottom line of civilization!”
