Jessica Chen Weiss's excellent book, Powerful Patriots, offers fine-grained case studies of why ruling groups facilitate or obstruct anti-foreign demonstrations, mostly against Japan and the Japanese. Making excellent use of a broad array of sources, Weiss details the interactions of Beijing and Tokyo with a sharp focus on how CCP ruling groups understand the dynamics of anti-Japan demonstrations in China. She insightfully applies social science theory, presenting the choice of CCP leaders as a cost-benefit calculus. Power-holders seek to minimize the risk from demonstrators turning against the regime and maximize the diplomatic gain by persuading Tokyo that Beijing cannot compromise because its hands are tied by popular outrage.
To Weiss, until 2012, CCP decision-makers tended to be rational and restrained while irrational masses and pugnacious Japanese threatened the peace. The PRC merely counter-escalated (p. 205). Such a framing omits Chinese domestic politics, especially the growing influence, since the ousting of Hu Yaobang, of Chinese hawks and chauvinists. The author never mentions the extraordinary CCP claim that most of the maritime territories of East and Southeast Asia are Chinese. This expansionist policy worries Asian neighbours. This policy was not decided by societal demonstrators. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe observed, with some exaggeration, that “China's maritime ambitions were akin to Hitler's demand for ‘living space’” (p. 188).
The study does not establish that the CCP's supporting of anti-foreign demonstrators threatens regime survival. Supporting anti-foreign demonstrators has never led to the toppling of a regime. Besides, the CCP state “is not feeble” (p. 223). It enjoys “sufficient strength to counteract” demonstrators (p. 224). The 2005 anti-Japan mobilization was “completely controlled” (p. 150). To Shi Yinhong, “If the government ... didn't want these demonstrations ... then there would be nothing” (p. 180). Yet Weiss does not explore the politics that lay behind the CCP state's stirring-up of vengeful, war-prone, anti-foreign hatreds.
Exaggerating the influence of popular nationalism, Weiss suggests that Chiang Kai-shek's ROC fell because it “failed to defend the country” (p. 227) against Hirohito's imperial invaders. Actually, the KMT did far more fighting and dying against Tojo's military than did Zhu De's Red Armies. However, after a US-led coalition defeated militarist Japan in 1945, Mao's CCP appealed to anti-American sentiment by promoting demonstrations against a GI alleged to have raped a Chinese student, while the CCP covered up the gang rapes of huge numbers of Chinese women by Stalin's military. Weiss misleads in not focusing on the political choices that lay behind anti-foreign mobilizations.
Weiss blames Japan for a 1995–96 worsening of Tokyo–Beijing relations. But at that time PRC military assertiveness worried virtually all of the PRC's neighbours. In addition, the CCP deeply wounded the feelings of the Japanese people by arrogantly ignoring the beseeching of Japanese leaders that the CCP not test nuclear weapons around the period of Japan's commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In explaining the CCP's mobilization of protesters against Japan's bid to join the UN Security Council in 1995–96, Weiss is silent on China's quest for hegemony in Asia. She gives the impression that the CCP's opposition to Japan in the UN Security Council was a response to the way Japanese wrote history or mourned their fallen dead. More is needed on CCP politics and ambitions.
Numerous scholarly studies establish that CCP Left conservative hawks have used anti-foreign appeals to strengthen themselves and weaken their more liberal adversaries. Anti-Japan mobilizations in 1985 – labelling liberal leader Hu Yaobang as “traitorous” (p. 85) – helped silence the most liberal voice in the CCP. Yet Weiss presents the sacking of Hu as a regime response to the Japanese prime minister visiting Yasukuni and a small trade deficit.
In contrast, the Japanese prime minister and the CIA both saw a “power struggle between the reformers and the conservatives” (p. 98) as causal. Weiss dismisses “power struggle” as just “rumors” (pp. 158, 159). Finding insufficient data to distinguish between her stress on diplomatic gain and the domestic conflict hypothesis, Weiss dismisses power struggle as a cause because the hard-liners were sincerely anti-Japanese (pp. 92–95). Is the CCP uniquely pure and principled such that its analysis of Japanese foreign policy choices as largely “the outcome of a political process in which various political forces fought for advantage” (pp. 197) does not hold for the PRC too?
Weiss finds that Japanese provocations have caused Chinese resistance “beginning with China's defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War” (p. 235). This recapitulates the current CCP's presentation of Japanese as an anti-China evil. Actually, in 1895, Chinese patriots, led by Sun Yat-sen, sided with Japan against the alien Manchu of the Qing Dynasty who had been humiliating Sinicized people for centuries. To Sun's Chinese nationalists, Japanese, sharing race and culture, were China's pan-Asian allies. In like manner, Mao long treated Japan as a partner in an anti-Soviet united front. Post-Mao politics mythologizes Japan as an enemy of China by its very nature. An analyst should clarify the changing factional forces that legitimate diverse nationalist narratives.
Weiss describes the CCP facilitating 2010 anti-Japanese demonstrations as a response to Japanese reneging on an implied tacit agreement to shelve territorial disputes, and the arrest of a Chinese trawler captain who rammed a Japanese government ship. Weiss is silent on supreme leader Hu Jintao's politics and policy in courting Japan's Abe in the immediate wake of 2005 anti-Japan demonstrations and conciliating Japan by investing great political capital in finding a compromise on energy and territory in the East China Sea. But, Chinese hawks, people who had been falsely insisting since at least 1982 that Japan was “resuming the (militarist) system which prevailed before World War II” (p. 93) forced Hu Jintao to back off his Good Neighbour Policy in 2010 as they had, in 1985–86, defeated Hu Yaobang's conciliationist policies. Hawks, who Weiss acknowledges were “unprecedentedly assertive” (p. 217) by 2012, actually had long been using anti-Japanese demonstrations for hawk, factional and policy gains.
In obscuring the influence of Left conservative hawks, Weiss claims that China's liberal constitutionalists are more likely to get China into a war with Japan. She dismisses Yu Jie's finding that anti-Japanese sentiment “serves the interest of brown-shirt” types (p. 233). Anomolously, but correctly focusing on the influence of factions in the decision for 1995–96 missile exercises against Taiwan, when no demonstrations were allowed, Weiss finds that Jiang Zemin had to make concessions to military hawks. Factional advantage is central to PRC foreign policy choices.
Weiss, again correctly, records that the faction that ousted Zhao Ziyang in 1989 for being too liberal held him responsible for supposedly mishandling protests. But, contrary to Weiss's theoretical framework, the goal of CCP hard-liners was not diplomatic gain but advancing their faction and hurting liberals.
My focus on an omission in Weiss's magnificent study can draw on material in Powerful Patriots because Weiss's research is thorough, reliable and professional. Powerful Patriots embodies scholarly excellence. The high quality of the book leads me to expect continuing world class contributions from Jessica Chen Weiss.
