Brainwashing and Blood Feuds

On the morning of 18 September, in China’s deep south, a ten-year-old boy of mixed Japanese and Chinese ancestry arrived with his mother at Shenzhen Japanese School. The child was immediately attacked by a Chinese man unknown to him, and knifed multiple times in the abdomen and thigh. One observer described a scene hard to forget: a mother screaming for help, several passers-by attempting CPR, and “a little boy lying in a pool of blood with his eyes wide open.” Shen Hangping died of his wounds early the following morning.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s hasty dismissal—“Such an accidental event can happen in any country in the world”—only succeeded in amplifying what it sought to obscure. While a random stabbing may not be a unique phenomenon, the modern Chinese hatred for Japan is certainly unique. There is no other history like the history these two share.

Even the date of the killing belied the notion that it was random. The eighteenth of September—or “918”—is the anniversary of the moment in 1931 when Japanese soldiers dynamited their own railway in South Manchuria, a false-flag operation that allowed them to immediately invade China. The killer knew the date; everyone knows the date. It’s a history that weighs heavy on the minds of all those educated by the Communist Party—so heavy that in the aftermath of the murder, some Chinese netizens actually accused Japan of staging this event too.

Three months before the Shenzhen tragedy, a Chinese man boarded a school bus in Suzhou, carrying a knife. He launched himself at a Japanese woman and her child. Bus attendant Hu Youping tackled him from behind, wrapping her arms round him. She sustained multiple stab wounds in the process, one of which pierced her heart, causing haemorrhagic shock. She died in hospital two days later (the mother and son both survived). Once again, the attack occurred right by a Japanese school, and once again, the Chinese Foreign Ministry was less concerned with expressing regret than it was with waving away the incident: “Similar cases may happen in any country!”

The atmosphere is restless and febrile; Japanese expats have been asked to refrain from speaking their native language in public. A video urging police to “expel” Shenzhen Japanese School from the country has been gaining traction on the popular app WeChat. Tokyo now talks of spending $2.5 million on security guards for buses serving Japanese schools in China.

“This is the result,” says former Japanese diplomat Yamagami Shingo, “of anti-[Japan] school education.” He’s not wrong. It is the Communist Party that bears responsibility for public hatred of China’s eastern neighbour. In kindergarten, children are coached to dress up as Chinese soldiers and “massacre the Japanese.” (The experience is formative: as adults working for companies like Tencent, they dress up at galas and indulge in the same performance all over again.) Children in rural villages chant “Japanese ghosts!” as they hurl stones at Western cyclists sporting handkerchiefs in their hats, because of the vague resemblance to Japanese soldiers. Bullies use the same taunt in the school playground.

In history lessons, no single event in the country’s long past is given as much focus as the 1937 “Rape of Nanking,” during which the Japanese imperial army tortured, raped, and killed huge numbers of Chinese. Students are taught to obsess over the atrocity, and certainly not to query it. Three years ago, one tutor chose to overstep that red line and question the Party-approved statistic for the Nanking casualty count (300,000). First, she was pilloried in state media—“errant as a teacher” and “errant as a compatriot”—then she was fired from her job. Another schoolteacher who publicly defended her was, for unclear reasons, punished even more severely: she was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric institute, despite being four months pregnant.

In such a context, few educators will risk departing from the script. So, the indoctrination continues, and for many of their young charges, it’s successful. Last year, high-school pupils in Zaozhuang staged a show re-enacting and celebrating the murder of Japan’s ex-President Abe Shinzo. Inevitably, these students will carry the same hatred with them into adulthood—just this summer, a young Chinese national spray-painted the word “toilet” on a Tokyo war memorial, before urinating on it. And, of course, they also carry it into government. A Chinese official was recently accused of commenting in an online group chat: “It is not a big deal to kill a Japanese child.”

“Hate-based ideology,” says dissident Vicky Xu, “has profoundly impacted the average Chinese person’s psyche.” She recalls her own nationalist youth: “When I first left China, and read about the Dalai Lama’s plans to tour Australia and give lectures, the first image that came to mind was me personally showing up to one of his events and causing physical destruction.” And even after she had come to reject the CCP and all it stood for, random Japanese accents that she encountered would still cause her bile to rise. The purge can take years to complete. Dissidents call the process “spitting out wolf-milk.”

But despite all the brainwashing, Chinese public reaction to the killings has been mixed—a reflection, perhaps, of the nation’s transitional state post-COVID. This is a society feverish with flux. There were some who praised Hu Youping (the murdered bus attendant) on social media, using terms that appeared to disregard their education: “We will remember your kindness and bravery, for you protected the safety of our Japanese friends and preserved the reputation of ordinary Chinese people.” Meanwhile, certain activists started a memorial campaign within China: a risky move indeed.

The situation on the ground is complex. Japan has always enjoyed a cultural cachet unique among Asian nations, and the Chinese are not immune. China has many avid fans of Japanese movies, anime, pornography, and food. Some love to wear traditional Japanese kimonos (though doing so in public is risky: while plenty of observers will pay no attention, others may call the police—and the police really do turn up). In the wake of the country’s economic struggles, meanwhile, affluent Chinese are actually moving to Japan in large numbers.

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The Japanophiles intersect with that nebulous proportion of society that began rejecting Party propaganda after Zero-COVID. Dissidents have told me that, for them, the key moment was the traumatic Shanghai lockdown in the spring of 2022. That was the turning-point; the terrible realisation that this Party does not care about them, cannot protect them, and is forever lying to them. And then there are some people who never really swallowed the propaganda in the first place. In politics classes, recalls Qi Ge, “I always counted silently to myself … instead of paying attention.” As a result, “by secondary school and college, my mind was unusually hard to brainwash.” A line from Oscar Wilde springs to mind—perhaps you remember it. “Disobedience is man’s original virtue.” It seems apt for modern China.

Paradoxically, then, it was the earnest and alert students who ended up drinking the wolf-milk, and losing their capacity to think rationally. They grew into the same people who now condemn Hu Youping for her brave sacrifice, calling her a traitor. Netizens applaud the attacker. They encourage further confrontations between Chinese and Japanese. “It would be best if all of Japan sank,” ran one typical comment, “leading to early racial extinction.”

Society is sharply divided, and we can see something similar in the government’s schizophrenic response. Beijing wants security at all costs: mindful of China’s long history of popular revolt, it lives in fear of its own overthrow. With an uneasy eye, the Party watches the behaviour of the nationalist monster it spawned. Internet platforms have been instructed to remove anti-Japanese posts in the wake of the stabbings. In Suzhou, local authorities announced that Hu Youping would be the recipient of a grand-sounding title: “Righteous and Courageous Role Model.”

The authorities are right to be nervous. Already, netizen fury has turned on those internet platforms that removed anti-Japanese content, and this fury comes with a distinctly nationalist framing. The tech company NetEase has been called “an enemy of the Chinese.” But NetEase was only following the instructions of its master in Beijing. And so we have an “enemy of the Chinese” only one step removed from the Communist Party itself.

While it attempts to control xenophobic outbursts, Beijing also wants to maintain its long and successful tradition of hate-preaching. Japan is a very useful scapegoat, and a target for displaced frustration. From this perspective, expressions of cross-national sympathy are just as dangerous as nationalistic hatred.

Those Chinese activists who signed statements and started campaigns after Shen Hangping’s murder soon found the police knocking at their doors. Officers did not want to talk about the boy, says one activist: they were only interested in finding out who was organising these statements. “They showed zero respect for a life that was lost.” More shocking to me was the authorities’ response to a letter from the boy’s father, which had begun circulating online. In this letter, the man eulogised his son, whose heart had been “more gentle than anyone else’s.” He refused to hold grudges. These were sentiments the CCP absolutely could not tolerate. The government censor got to work, and the letter vanished.

Around the same time, two Chinese law professors posted a warning to the public: “Do not indulge in violence in the name of patriotism”—again, a bridge too far for the authorities. The professors’ warning was removed from online platforms. Outside the digital world, the authorities behaved in much the same way. Within 48 hours of the Shenzhen stabbing, all flowers had disappeared from the front of the school, and security guards were posted to prevent any further displays of mourning.

Some of those bouquets had borne the legend: “We share one moon under the same sky.” Love, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, overcoming national divisions—these queasy old clichés are immensely dangerous to the Communist Party. They might well be its deadliest enemies. They could undermine and destroy the entire project: a project birthed in class-hatred, and kept alive in modern times through race-hatred. Without hatred, the CCP has nothing.

These anti-Japan attacks have actually occurred within the context of a much bigger Chinese knife crime problem. Plenty of media attention was given to Saturday’s stabbing rampage at a Wuxi college, where eight students were killed and seventeen injured. There was no such interest in the six-month spate of assaults that preceded it. On an almost daily basis, gruesome videos are posted to X depicting the reality of life in China’s forgotten corners. In Baoding, a man with a sickle butchers two victims before a watching crowd. In Nanning, a young hooligan stamps a woman’s head to the ground and slashes her more than thirty times with a chef’s knife. In Dalian, a shirtless youth returns time and again to lacerate his victim’s lifeless body in the middle of a busy road. In Baoji, a middle-aged man is stabbed in the femoral artery outside a restaurant. Unlike in the movies, he stands there in apparent confusion for a full 26 seconds, the lifeblood pumping from one trouser leg and painting the paving stones a bright arterial red, before he finally and abruptly pitches backward.

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It’s not clear why this horror movie is playing out across the country now. But I have wondered in the past about the potential social impact of China’s skewed demographics. Perhaps we are finally seeing that impact. There are 40 million more men than women, a consequence of Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy and the resultant rise in sex-selective abortion. That’s a small nation of angry incels. Recent years have brought immense pressures to bear on the Chinese psyche: a pandemic; mass imprisonments under Zero-COVID; widespread economic difficulties. Throughout all of this, for millions of young men, there has been the ongoing agony of singledom without hope—a slow tightening of the vice, day after day. We should hardly wonder that some minds have snapped.

Their victims have been anyone within reach, it seems: whoever happened to aggravate them on that particular day. But as we saw in Suzhou and Shenzhen, there is also a danger that ravaged psyches will begin zeroing in on that old boogeyman from their schooldays: the Japanese “devil” or “ghost.” The Party put this devil in their minds in the first place, mismanaging China’s psychology just as it mismanaged China’s economy and demographics. As a result, the country is more unstable than it has been for decades, and especially unsafe for its 100,000 Japanese residents.