China-Japan Business: When History Gets in the Way
January 14th, 2008 | by This is China! |
The December 1st edition of The Economist Magazine had an excellent survey of Japanese business, reviewing the country’s progress since its economy’s meltdown in the 1990s and early 2000’s.
One passage in particular stood out for me:
“China recently surpassed America as Japan’s main trading partner, but new investment by Japanese firms in China actually fell by 30% in 2006, to $4.5 billion. In a survey asking Japanese firms to rate the best countries to invest in over the next three years, the proportion picking China fell from 91% in 2004 to 77% in 2006. That is still an impressive number, but the decline reflects both the expense of making things in China (compared with India and Vietnam) and growing concern over anti-Japanese sentiment.”
The passage put me in mind of a conversation I had with a Japanese acquaintance in Shanghai just a month after the September 2004 protests. In the summer of 2004 the Japanese government had tried to bludgeon its way to international respectability in a manner that seriously irked the Chinese leadership: the Japanese government published new school textbooks essentially repudiating any war crimes against the Chinese during what we in the West call WW II (and what the Chinese call “The Japanese War of Aggression”); and the Japanese made a go at a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations.
The powers that be in Beijing let that bit of information through its Great Firewall of China and fanned the flames of popular discontent with Japan’s lack of contrition. Millions of Chinese protesters for days on end marched the streets of Shanghai and other cities throughout China, smashing Japanese products and defacing Japanese businesses.
I asked a Japanese acquaintance, Ito, where he was during the protests. He answered, “I was in my apartment, watching it on the TV and out the window.” Ito is a tall man, in his late forties, with a light dusting of gray in his hair. He is an affable fellow, fun to sing karaoke with, which we did together on many occasions. He continued, “I expected at any moment for a crowd to break through the door and beat me.”
I asked him what effect he thought the protests would have on Japanese investment. “It will be less,” he said, without having to consider an answer. “Japanese will not feel their companies or people are safe.” Seems he was right.
One hopes with the current Japanese administration under Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda the Japanese will stop tweaking the collective Chinese nose by visiting the Yasakune Shrine to the dead Japanese soldiers of World War II. The Shrine also has interred the remains of a dozen or so Class A war criminals. At the same time, the Chinese government is going to have to learn to face up to its own ghosts, including the famine of the Great Leap Forward, which left 30 million dead in its own wake; and the Cultural Revolution, which seemed to have killed as many and affected every family in China as dramatically as any war. Then, perhaps, China can accept that history does happen - in much the same ways the Europeans have accepted Nazi atrocities - and move forward in developing itself into a modern society.
Statistics can lie; but the lies that both of Asia’s powerhouses subscribe their citizens to will only serve to resurrect a history best reconciled.
Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China
