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A Japanese boy was stabbed on his way to school in China on Sept. 18. That’s the date when, nearly a century earlier in 1931, Japan invaded China.
The child, who was 10 years old, was pronounced dead the next morning. The police arrested a 44-year-old man at the scene who they said had confessed to the attack. Japan’s leaders demanded answers. The Chinese government, calling the attack an “isolated incident,” told Japan to calm down and stop “politicizing” the killing.
Some Chinese people believe the boy was a victim of surging anti-Japanese sentiment fueled by China’s government with a virulent nationalism that is taught in schools and reflected online and in state media.
The evening the boy died, more than 50 Chinese attended a candlelight vigil in Tokyo and issued a statement: “The longstanding extreme nationalism and anti-Japanese education in China have misled some people’s perception of Japan, enabling ignorance and wrongdoing. We are committed to changing this troubling situation.”
Then, a week after his death, young activists, mostly in China but also some outside the country, started a memorial campaign. According to Chinese folklore, the souls of the deceased come back to visit their families after seven days before leaving for heaven.
“As Chinese citizens, we do not wish to grow up in a land of hatred,” the activists said in a statement co-signed by more than 200 people.
I interviewed many Chinese who were outraged at what they said was increasing xenophobic indoctrination. Some were in Japan or in the United States, but others were in China, where even public grief at times like these could be seen as dissent. They said that hating the Japanese had become a politically correct view to hold in China.
They asked themselves: Were they enablers of hate if they remained silent? What could they do to prevent future tragedies? They decided that they had to speak out; inaction would be cowardice.
So they laid flowers at the gate of the boy’s school in Shenzhen in southern China. They held small memorial services, some online and some in person. They co-signed statements with their real names and wrote social media articles and posts even though they knew the censors and the nationalist mobs would lash out at them.
“Some friends said to us, ‘Don’t write, don’t speak out, because you’ll get attacked,’” two Beijing law professors wrote on social media. “But that child has died. If we stay silent, we are all complicit.”
“Silence, avoidance and turning a blind eye are all forms of indulgence in violence and show disregard for the deceased,” they wrote.
It’s hard to tell how many Chinese feel this way. But I have followed nationalism in China closely for years, through interviews and by studying what is said online. The anger people feel at the hatred education is more palpable now than anytime since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, put the country in an ideological straitjacket made of nationalism more than a decade ago.
More than 200 people signed the two statements in their real names, a defiant act because China’s authorities are reflexively opposed to such organized actions.
A 24-year-old woman who signed a statement told me that she had been summoned by two state security officers and questioned for two hours. She said they had told her that the statement was “a deliberate act organized by anti-China forces, intending to stir up trouble and undermine the stability of Chinese society.”
The officers didn’t want to talk about the boy, she said. They cared only about who organized the statement and why anyone would sign it. “They showed zero respect for a life that was lost,” she said.
The officers’ attitude wasn’t surprising. Anti-Japanese content populates all types of media in China. A former Japanese ambassador told a Japanese newspaper that he had asked the Chinese authorities to take down online misinformation to no effect. The videos he was concerned about depicted Japanese schools in China as training grounds for future spies or showed fictional dramas of ordinary Chinese beating up Japanese.
Kuaishou, a major Chinese short video platform, punished more than 90 accounts that it said had spread harmful information and incited China-Japan antagonism. A former employee of another short video site said anti-Japanese content was popular because it attracted traffic and was not usually censored by the government.
Chinese people are repeatedly told that they should hate Japanese, Americans, Hong Kong democracy protesters, pro-independence Taiwanese and any critics of the Chinese government. It’s the only correct thing to do.
A migrant worker told me in an interview last year that his 11-year-old son had been offended when he explained the tensions between China and Taiwan. His son accused him of not being a good Chinese. He had been taught at school that Taiwan was part of China. For him, it was the one and only correct answer.
A Chinese woman who has been living in Europe for years wrote to me saying she didn’t dare to talk about the Japanese boy’s death with her father. “I’m terrified of hearing my father say, ‘He deserved it.’ If he does, I might have a nervous breakdown,” she wrote. “But this seems almost inevitable if nationalist sentiments continue to be stoked.”
In June, a middle-aged Chinese man attacked a Japanese mother and her son with a knife at a school bus stop in the eastern city of Suzhou. They were injured while the bus attendant, a Chinese woman, died trying to stop the man. Many people cheered the attack on social media — “They deserve it” and “Well done!” — while calling the Chinese woman “Traitor!”
The problem in China is how strictly the government controls speech, said Tomoko Ako, a sociologist focused on China at the University of Tokyo.
“A government should allow many kinds of opinions, including those critical of hate speech,” she said. Professor Ako is equally critical of online speeches in Japan that make sweeping statements about the Chinese people.
After a major Japanese newspaper wrote about the candlelight vigil in Tokyo, some Japanese left harsh comments on Yahoo Japan. “If you truly want to mourn, then denounce the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party,” one commenter wrote. “If you can’t do that, it’s just a gesture.”
That’s the dilemma that independent-minded Chinese face. At home, the powerful authoritarian state makes their efforts to push back against extreme nationalism seem negligible. A mantis trying to stop a chariot is the apt Chinese expression. Outside China, much of the world tends to look at the country and its people with suspicion.
The day after the death of the Japanese boy, a letter that appeared to be from his father circulated on China’s internet. He said he and his wife, who is Chinese, felt that they and their son belonged to both countries.
“We will not hate China, and likewise, we will not hold hatred for Japan,” the father wrote. “My only wish is that such tragedies never happen again.”
Many people shared the letter on social media, almost as a protest. Then it disappeared completely, something that only the top government censor could have ordered.
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