The largest action took place in Shanghai, where 20,000 people marched on the Japanese consulate, according to press reports. They threw rocks and bottles, attacked Japanese businesses, and smashed the windows of Japanese cars. There were also demonstrations in Nanning, Sheyang, and Shenzhan, and 4,000 gathered in Victoria Park in the center of Hong Kong.

Chinese government officials have refused Tokyo’s demand that they apologize for the protests and damage to Japanese businesses and diplomatic buildings. “The Chinese government has never done anything for which it has to apologize to the Japanese people,” Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing said when he met with his Japanese counterpart April 17. “The problem now is that the Japanese government has done a series of things that have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people on the Taiwan issue, some international issues, and especially the treatment of history.”

The new textbooks describe the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, in which as many as 300,000 Chinese were killed, as an “incident,” and give barely a mention to the 200,000 mainly Chinese and Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese occupying forces. The cover-up is a part of an ideological campaign on the part of the Japanese government to promote nationalism to justify Tokyo’s more aggressive course in the region and worldwide.

Protesters have called for a boycott of Japanese goods. China is Japan’s biggest trading partner with exports and imports of $206 billion a year, a fifth of Japan’s total. Japan is China’s third-largest trading partner after the European Union and the United States.  
 
Japanese remilitarization
Japan and China are the two largest Asian military powers. Beijing’s military has been expanding rapidly in technological sophistication, an increasing worry to both Tokyo and Washington. U.S. and Japanese officials have noted with particular alarm the growth of the Chinese navy. Last year, Japanese officials said they had detected a Chinese submarine was detected for the first time in Japanese territorial waters, a sign of the growing extension of Beijing’s naval power.

“China has to strengthen its naval forces to guarantee the security of its access to shipped resources and should actively develop a large shipping fleet capable of operating in distant oceans,” wrote Men Honghua, a professor of strategic studies at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School, according to the April 7 Financial Times. Honghua noted that China’s dependency on imports of oil and raw materials means that it relies on a shipping “lifeline” that runs through the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, Malacca Strait, and Indian Ocean all the way to the Arabian Sea.

For this reason, Hongua says, Beijing is seeking to transform its navy from a coastal defense force to a “blue water” navy capable of operating well beyond China’s territorial waters.

Both countries’ economies depend upon this lifeline for petroleum and other resources. Tokyo announced April 13 that Japanese companies would begin oil explorations in a section of the East China Sea that China claims as a part of its territorial waters. The Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation has already begun oil and gas exploration in the same waters.

Tokyo has a formidable military, one of the strongest in the world, but since its defeat at the hands of Washington in World War II the Japanese rulers have been greatly hampered in their ability to use these forces to advance their imperialist interests. The Japanese post-war constitution, drafted by Washington, forbids Japan from using its military abroad and requires Tokyo to maintain forces only for “self defense.”

This constitutional clause has been the center of a heated dispute in Japan as the country’s rulers have steadily pressed to use their military forces more aggressively in the region and as part of imperialist interventions in other parts of the world. In 2003, Tokyo sent troops to Iraq as a part of Washington’s “coalition of the willing,” and sent 950 troops to Indonesia—its biggest military operation since the second world war—for tsunami relief

It is this remilitarization that is at the root of the ideological campaign aimed at fanning Nippon nationalism among the Japanese population.  
 
Tensions over Taiwan
This spring the tensions between Tokyo and Beijing were ratcheted up another notch when the Japanese government signed defense accords with Washington explicitly calling the straits of Taiwan a “common strategic objective” of both imperialist powers. The 100-mile straits separate mainland China from Taiwan, a former province of China. In 1949, with the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the landlord- and capitalist-based forces of the Kuomintang party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled to the island and set up a rival government. Since then, the island has been fiercely guarded by Washington and armed to the teeth. It has served as a dagger aimed by imperialism at the Chinese Revolution.

On March 14, the Chinese parliament declared that any move by Taiwan towards formal independence would be grounds for military action by Beijing to defend its sovereignty.

Washington has used the vote in China’s parliament to press for the maintenance of a European arms embargo to prevent China from getting access to strategic weapons. On April 15, the 25 member nations within the European Union pulled back from lifting the 15-year embargo.  
 
 
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