A number of historians and other leading commentators have noted the similarities between the 1930's and today, starting with the stock market crash, the rise of currrency/protectionist wars and now the first drum beats of war.As WSWS articles have been emphasising, a militarist atmosphere is being created in China. The theme is the imminence of war with Japan. In the past weeks, nearly every news report features the latest “provocation” by Japan over the disputed Diaoyu islands, for example, the fact that Japan discussed allowing its air force to fire warning shots to ward off Chinese aircraft. There are regular heated debates on various television “focus” programs, where participants call for war on Japan if any damage is done to Chinese vessels or aircraft.
For a number of academics, military and strategic “analysis” has become the latest boom industry. On TV shows they speculate endlessly about the various scenarios for the upcoming war with Japan, the implications of US strategic encirclement, and so on. They comment on the latest Chinese weapons and their use in such a conflict. A leading figure, Rear Admiral Zhang Shaozhong from the National Defence University, bragged on China Central Television that, if war broke out, China could “finish off Japan in 30 minutes.” During last year’s standoff with the Philippines over the Scarborough Shoal, Zhang proposed going to war with Manila because it would be a “one-sided fight”—assuming, of course, that the US did not intervene.
China’s people are being constantly bombarded by reports of new fighters, tanks and missiles. This month, the military unveiled plans to build six 20,000-tonne amphibious assault ships capable of carrying helicopters, tanks and marines, for the upcoming “island warfare” in the South China Sea or East China Sea. The media celebrated the testing of China’s first domestically-built military transport plane capable of delivering heavy tanks to a distant war. A diagram showed that the plane could reach North Africa, where thousands of Chinese nationals had to be evacuated during the Libyan war in 2011. The program also showed that the plane could drop Chinese troops in Sydney international airport in the event of a war with Australia.
On the newsstands in the street, full colour magazine covers depict a dogfight with a Japanese warplane, or an anti-ship missile flying toward an American aircraft carrier. Jingoistic tabloids like the Global Times, owned by the official People’s Daily, are becoming increasing influential. Not long ago, it featured an essentially racist “analysis” explaining that pre-war Japanese militarism was rooted in Japanese culture. An ad on the Global Times site referred to the fact that in Japan a man, who beat to death a Chinese student, was only jailed for a few years. It was designed to incite anti-Japanese racism.
Militarism is also being fanned on the Internet. The same analysts have xenophobic blogs attacking “foreign enemies,” and these helped to provoke the anti-Japanese demonstrations last year over the Diaoyu islands conflict. Just as Beijing gave the green light for these sometime violent protests, so the Internet police, who are quick to crack down on any government critics, seem to be allowing the ultra-nationalists on the web to say anything they like.
It is sometimes is hard to distinguish private opinion from government views. As the discussion was heating up about Japanese warning shots, Hefei Online, the official news portal of Anhui province’s capital city, published an article calling for nuclear attacks on Japan if China failed to defeat the Japanese air force. It boasted that China could launch “2-5 waves of nuclear strikes against Japan within 24 to 72 hours.” After discounting Japan’s anti-missiles systems, the article concluded: “In such an initial nuclear war with Japan, large cities including Tokyo will be annihilated by nuclear strikes.”
I want to point out that this type of madness has only a limited appeal. Ordinary Chinese have no enthusiasm for a war. No-one thinks of China as a superpower that can challenge Japan, and its ally, the United States. Most people have to exist on a few dollars a day, and they feel that they are living more in a Third World nation than in an advanced country.
But militarism is finding a response in some members of the new upper middle class, which has developed since the restoration of capitalism and the market in China in the 1980s. They have a dream of China becoming a world power, enriching themselves, and they regard the existing powers, especially Japan and the US, as obstacles to their ambitions. They have only contempt for the Chinese workers, and feel threatened by them. In fact, these rich Chinese have a lot in common with the very Japanese ultra-nationalists and “right-wing militarists” they denounce.
There are haunting parallels between Bismarkian Germany before WW1 and modern day China. Could the rising miltaristic and nationalistic factions in China drive the country to a war with Japan and even the United States? Maybe, it is concerning that already many people in the Chinese media are openly talking about war.
