CHINA PHOTOS / REUTERS

OPEN WOUNDS: Chinese rally in September on the 73rd anniversary of Japan's invasion of China

Patriot Games
	Stoked by nationalism, a new generation of Chinese feels growing hostility toward Japan
	By Hannah Beech | Beijing

Posted Monday, November 22, 2004; 20:00 HKT
With his bowl-cut hair and a slight squint from too many hours spent in front of the computer, Lu Yunfei looks like any other software engineer in Beijing enjoying the Chinese dream. During the day, the 29-year-old designs websites; his fiancé also works at an Internet company. In April they bought an apartment. In his spare time Lu unwinds with a little badminton or karaoke. On other evenings, he gathers together with a posse of friends that includes lawyers, venture capitalists, journalists and a few other software entrepreneurs. The topic of conversation, though, doesn't revolve around the latest IPO or preferential mortgage rates. Instead, Lu and his buddies are at the forefront of a populist movement that calls for Japan to fully redress the wrongs it committed more than half a century ago when it brutally occupied China. "This is the most important thing young Chinese can do," says Lu, who helped run the China Patriots' Alliance website for two years until it was quietly closed by the authorities. "We have to show that China is self-confident and powerful and can stand up to a country like Japan."

Even as trade between China and Japan has more than doubled over the past five years, Lu and other young, educated firebrands are showing how little their politics have been influenced by economics. Sony may be the brand Chinese trust the most, according to marketing firm ACNielsen, but a China Youth Daily poll among 100,000 interviewees with an average age of 25 found that 56% of those surveyed most associate the personality trait "cruel" with the Japanese. No surprise, then, that in this year alone, Lu has organized seven demonstrations in front of the Japanese embassy in Beijing, protesting everything from Japan's bid to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where several top World War II criminals are commemorated. Last year, after coordinating an online petition that collected 82,700 signatures in just 10 days, Lu's team forced the Chinese Ministry of Railways to reconsider giving a $16 billion contract for a high-speed Beijing-Shanghai train to the Japanese Shinkansen group, designer of Japan's famous bullet trains. "We changed government policy," says Zhao Zhongchen, a property developer who signed the petition and who tracks his antipathy toward Japan to family stories about his grandmother being beaten by Japanese troops during the war. "Foreigners might not understand, but it's rare that individuals can band together and create such a result."

Fifteen years after the youthful activism of Tiananmen Square, a new breed of young Chinese agitators is finding its voice. Its mantra, though, is not democracy but the promotion of Chinese nationalism. Well-educated and united by the Internet, today's activists want China to flex its muscle against any foreign power they feel is holding back their resurgent nation. And their main target is Japan, which they feel has not adequately apologized for its egregious wartime past. Nor do they believe that Tokyo handled sensitively enough the death last year of a construction worker in northeastern China who unwittingly opened a canister of mustard gas left by the Japanese during World War II, or a 2003 orgy by hundreds of Japanese businessmen in the southern city of Zhuhai that ended on Sept. 18, the exact date Japan invaded China more than seven decades ago. China's young patriots claim there has been a rise in nationalism among Japanese youth—evidence, they say, that their island neighbor is turning back to imperialism. "We have to fight back," says Lu. "Textbooks in Japan ignore all the terrible things they did to us, so young Japanese don't feel any guilt and they want their government to remilitarize. We cannot allow that to happen."

China's leaders clamp down on most forms of political expression, but in the past few years they have given anti-Japanese rabble-rousers a relatively long leash. "The [central] government understands that people today want a way to express themselves, and nationalism is a good safety valve," says Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Shanghai's Fudan University. Though Beijing security officials have regularly nixed university students' plans to hold demonstrations against the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Lu and his cohorts have held repeated anti-Japanese protests without any official interference. "The Chinese government believes that Japan needs China more economically than vice versa," says George Wei, an associate professor of history at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, who has co-edited two books about Chinese nationalism. "That makes it easier for China to take a more aggressive stance against Japan than it does with America."

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