BEIJING (Jan 25, 2014): One hundred years
after the outbreak of World War I, China and Japan are ripping selected
pages from Germany's history -- including the Nazi period -- as they
seek to demonise each other in their modern-day diplomatic battles.
Beijing's state-controlled media have compared Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe to Adolf Hitler, using shrill rhetoric that analysts
say exploits Tokyo's mixed messages about its past aggression in China
and elsewhere.
At the same time, they urge him to emulate Germany's post-war contrition for the evils of Nazism.
Abe, for his part, has raised the spectre of 1914, saying at the
World Economic Forum in Switzerland that relations between Japan and
China resemble those of Britain and Germany as they stumbled towards
war.
Tokyo and Beijing are locked in an increasingly acrimonious row over
small, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that Japan controls but
China regards as its territory, with their militaries warily eyeing
each other.
Commentators have likened China, a rising power, to Germany in the
early 20th century and portrayed the islands as Sarajevo, site of the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that triggered the Great War.
In Davos, Abe pointed out that war broke out in 1914 despite strong economic relations between Germany and Britain.
"I think we are in a similar situation. We don't want an inadvertent
conflict arising between these two countries," he told reporters.
China's foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang roundly rejected the
simile Thursday.
"Actually in history China was already a major country
in the Tang and Song dynasties (from the seventh to the 13th centuries),
so there is no so-called 'China is becoming a major country'," he said.
"There is no need to make an issue of the Britain-Germany relationship."
Hitler's DNA
Chinese officials have lashed out at Abe since his December 26 visit
to the hugely controversial Yasukuni shrine, which honours 2.5 million
Japanese war dead including 14 senior war criminals described by Qin as
"the Nazis of the East".
The shrine is seen in China and South Korea as a symbol of Japan's
20th century military and colonial aggression which saw the country
occupy a large swathe of East Asia, often to brutal effect on civilians
and prisoners of war.
In what analysts see as crude propaganda, the overseas edition of the Communist Party mouthpiece
People's Daily headlined an article "Hitler's DNA in Abe", illustrated with a mock-up of Japan's leader gazing up at the Fuhrer.
The
Global Times tabloid, in its English edition, this week
carried a cartoon of Japan's national flag with the sun symbol in the
centre dripping blood and a swastika imposed.
"You could say it's propaganda," Torsten Weber, an expert in modern
East Asian history at the German Institute for Japanese Studies in
Tokyo, told
AFP.
"It is a way to distort history and it's also a way to distract
attention from more pressing problems that, for example, China faces."
Chinese media have also tried to compare Abe unfavourably with how Germany faced up to Nazi atrocities.
The official Xinhua news agency urged him to follow the example of
West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who fell to his knees at a monument
to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- a brutally crushed 1943
revolt by Jews in the Polish capital facing deportation to the Nazi
death camps.
- AFP
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