SPEAKING FREELY
Where did all the angels go?
By Andrew Field

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

While the world has been riveted to the anti-Japan protests in China in recent weeks, no one should forget that China has not been an angel for decades and has colonized and committed horrors against its own people, taking over Tibet and ruthlessly suppressing the culture and the folkways in both Tibet and predominantly Muslim Xinjiang. Let's not forget the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

If the original occupants of Tibet and its northern neighbor Xinjiang rose up en masse and held anti-Chinese demonstrations, chanting racist slogans, stoning Chinese properties, and claiming they had been violently colonized and systematically stripped of their religions, folkways, and resources, would Chinese protestors be sympathetic to their cause? Food for thought.

In the both the short and long view of history, no one is an angel, even those who cleave to victim status today. It's important to bear that in mind as we listen to rival nations and groups revile each other, rightly or wrongly.

The anti-Japan protests in China have sent shock waves of recognition and reaction across the planet. Key to the protest movement in China is the claim that Japan has backpedaled in its own historical accounts of World War II as its leaders take a firmer right-wing nationalist stance on their own country's past. Japanese educators have elided the words "invasion" and "massacre" from their textbooks, preferring milder terms such as "incident" to describe the Japanese military assault on China in 1937 and the bloody events in Nanjing that December.

According to The New York Times (April 17), recently published textbooks in Japan have also removed the term "comfort women" to refer to the women from China, Japan, and Korea who were forced to serve as prostitutes to Japanese soldiers, some serving as many as several dozen men in one day. Koreans and Chinese who toiled in Japanese labor camps during the war are no longer "forced" to do so, but are instead working "against their will". Meanwhile, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and other Japanese leaders simply refuse to stop visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which cherishes the memory of convicted Class-A war criminals, at least as defined by the Allied victors, as well as ordinary war dead. Koizumi did not visit the shrine this year.

Japanese officials and many outside observers have countered that China misrepresents the past in its own textbooks and therefore has no business telling other nations how they should teach their own children. A government that shields its own people from full knowledge of its atrocities and catastrophes, it is argued, has no right to tell others not to do so.

As many news items published in previous weeks suggest, the real reasons behind the protests may indeed lay elsewhere - in the current debate over Japan's proposed entry into the United Nations Security Council as a permanent member, in the competition between Japan and China over offshore drilling rights, in Japan's willingness to help the United States defend Taiwan from an assault by China - or simply, as suggested by the official crackdown on anti-Japan protests in China, in tensions within the Chinese government as rival factions battle it out for supremacy over the Communist Party.

Nevertheless, judging from the voices and actions of the demonstrators who hit the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities, as well as the millions of others who sent messages out over the Internet and on mobile phones, the anger in China against Japan’s distortion of history is real and palpable, and cannot simply be dismissed as government propaganda.

These protests have put forward a number of interesting questions; among them, who has the right to define how history is taught? Can one country claiming "victim" status rightfully declare that another must own up to its past as an aggressive imperialist and colonizer? What happens when the "victim" is itself a colonizer? Here is where history gets complex and tangled.

As everyone on the planet knows, China has been no angel in recent decades. Events from the Mao Zedong years, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are viewed by most people both in and out of China as monumental disasters. The events in Tiananmen Square leading up to the June 4, 1989, massacre are emblazoned in the minds of anybody outside China old enough to turn on the television and watch CNN. China's occupation of Tibet following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 has generated protests not just in that region, but all over the world, particularly in places where the charismatic Dalai Lama retains an influence, as in Hollywood.

Yet things get even more complex when one examines the history of relations between Tibet, Xinjiang and China. The Chinese government claims that Xinjiang has been a part of China since the early Han dynasty, when the great Emperor Wu (140-187 BC) sent military expeditions as far as Fergana in an effort to control the trade routes into Central Asia later known as the Silk Road. Even though colonization of the region by ethnic Chinese did not begin in earnest until the latter half of the 20th century, Chinese military and cultural influence in Xinjiang has indeed been strong over the past two millennia, waxing and waning with the might of China's own dynasties. The Uighurs, the dominant ethnicity in Xinjiang, have certainly had a checkered and violent history of relations with China over the centuries. Some would argue that even if China were to disentangle itself from the region (hard to do with half the population of Xinjiang now consisting of ethnic Chinese), they themselves do not have a legitimate claim to nationhood, since many other ethnic minorities also occupy the region, such as the Kazaks. Sound depressingly familiar?

Despite their current status as "victims", the Tibetans historically are no angels either. In fact, Tibetan aggression on its western borders contributed to the downfall of China's "golden age" of the High Tang, helping to bring about the violent chaos of the An Lushan rebellion in 755. Even though the Tang regained their dynasty in 763, Tibetan raiders continued to plague the Tang capital of Chang'an (now Xi'an) for the next 20 years. Tibet's case as a historical "victim" is further compromised by the strategic alliance between the Tibetan kingdom and the fierce Dzungar Mongols in the 18th century, which frightened the Manchu Emperor Yongzheng and later his son Qianlong into sending thousands of troops westward to take control of these regions and bring them decisively into the grasp of the Chinese imperium, in the process practically exterminating the Dzungars as a race.

When it comes down to it, can any nation-state, region, or people truly claim "victim" status in the world today? Perhaps the Jews can - that is, prior to the creation of their own nation-state in 1948. Certainly nobody would argue that Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who tragically committed suicide while crossing the Spanish-French border on September 27, 1940, in a desperate attempt to prevent being taken to a Nazi concentration camp, wasn't a victim of his times.

Walter Benjamin once wrote, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." As Benjamin keenly and depressingly recognized, every nation's history is a systematic erasure of difference, whether through conquest, colonization, acculturation, penetration, or just plain old genocide. In the process, history is also erased as living memory, oral and written testament is wiped out.

Should we not all just own up to our own barbarity then and teach our children how the world really works? A frightening prospect. Why not wait until they are old enough, say, of college age, before telling them of the atrocities that accompany the rise and expansion of human civilization. After all, most of us wouldn't let our children see a violent war film. Even if we did, would it really be possible for them to grasp the full implications of what they were seeing?

Here is a proposition, then. Why not have an international body of historians that rates history the same way the film industry rates films? Let us call it the United History Security Council. But then, who would compose that body? Should it be composed of representatives from each nation? If so, which representatives? Should larger nations be given more seats than smaller ones? Should ethnic minorities be given seats, or just the dominant ethnicities? Or should representatives of places that have been relegated to the dustbin of modern nationalism, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, be included as well?

Or should we just teach our children that real history is not learned in school? But then, historians like me would be out of a job.

Andrew Field teaches Chinese and Japanese history at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is currently working on a research project on the history of Sino-Japanese relations leading up to World War II.

(Copyright 2005 Andrew Field.)

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.