China’s Patriotic Rhetoric Takes a Violent Turn
‘Hate education’ becomes new buzzword in China after stabbings of foreigners, while online pleas for compassion are stifled
China’s Communist Party has for years stoked patriotism in the state media and the country’s classrooms, driving nationalist fervor that at times spun out of control.
Now, three stabbing attacks in four months that targeted Japanese and Americans have exposed a dark side of that campaign, what many in China describe as “hate education.”
In one of the past year’s viral videos, a desk-pounding schoolteacher lectures to her students about China’s “blood feud” with Japan, admonishing them to never forget the atrocities conducted by the Japanese army in World War II. State media praised her, and other teachers reposted her video.
In another video, a Chinese mother expresses pride as her grade-school daughter rebukes her baffled preschool brother over his love of Ultraman, the Japanese science-fiction character.
Recent rancor aimed at foreign rivals has been tolerated and in some cases promoted by Chinese authorities in schools and social media—where censors can suppress unwelcome views and allow others to flourish. That approach runs counter to Beijing’s mission to restore global connections that helped power economic growth in the past.
“Hate is inside China’s education” in schools, media and patriotic movies, said Wang Ke, a retired Kobe University professor who has studied nationalism in China and modern Japan. “The Communist Party has been licking historical wounds, consciously not letting it heal.”
Public pleas for compassion have been routinely stifled. After the stabbing death of a 10-year-old Japanese boy on his way to school in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen on the Sept. 18 anniversary of Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, two Beijing law professors posted a warning against the spread of hatred.
“Do not indulge in violence in the name of patriotism,” Chen Bi and Zhao Hong wrote on their personal blog on WeChat, China’s ubiquitous social-media platform. “If history is remembered through hate, what follows will be more killings and harm.”
Their commentary was removed from online platforms after many readers reposted it. The Cyberspace Administration of China didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“China does not teach its people to hate Japan,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said several days after the 10-year-old’s death. “We believe that to learn from history is not for perpetuating hatred but for avoiding the tragedy of war from repeating itself.”
Textbooks in China have long highlighted Japanese wartime atrocities and portrayed the U.S. as its ideological rival.
As pronounced by leader Xi Jinping, vigilance against the West is a necessity. China’s adversaries “have put more effort into winning the hearts of our youngsters than in anything else,” he said in a newly released speech to a national education conference six years ago.
In recent years, China has revised textbooks used in schools across the country to support Xi’s leadership and his emphasis on national security, alongside sustained themes such as placing support for the Communist Party at the heart of the country’s patriotism.
Lessons in Chinese schools reinforce official positions on topics such as border conflicts with India and Beijing’s proclaimed sovereignty in the South China Sea.
Revised textbooks also retain long-established themes about China’s war with the U.S. on the Korean Peninsula and heroic tales of fighting the Japanese.
The recent outburst of anti-Japan sentiment intensified last year after Beijing vilified Tokyo for releasing water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, though the releases had been approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Shortly after, at a middle-school play in the northern Chinese city of Zaozhuang, students drew applause when they re-enacted the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and unfurled a banner criticizing the Fukushima water releases, according to state media.
Local education authorities later said the performance wasn’t “entirely appropriate,” but that the students should be tolerated for their mistakes because of their age.
Public debate on China’s internet wavered between those who said that the students were righteous in expressing anti-Japanese attitudes and those who expressed concern that an act of political violence was being taken too lightly.
In the months that followed, Japanese schools in China emerged as a target on social media, a message that turned deadly this year. The stabbing in September was preceded by an attack in June by a Chinese man with a knife on a Japanese woman and her child at a school-bus stop in Suzhou, a city in eastern China with a large Japanese population. The two were injured; the bus attendant, a Chinese woman, fought the man and was killed.
A few weeks earlier, four instructors affiliated with an American college were stabbed by a Chinese man while walking in a park in Jilin, a northern Chinese city. China’s Foreign Ministry said the incident wouldn’t affect “the normal development of people-to-people and cultural exchanges between China and the U.S.”
Chinese authorities have revealed little about the attackers in the three stabbing attacks, which they described as isolated incidents.
Following the boy’s killing in Shenzhen, Japanese officials requested that China remove extreme anti-Japan content from the internet. Most Chinese platforms had already started to do that after the stabbing in Suzhou in June, but anti-Japan content never slowed, and many of the most prominent social-media voices promoting extreme nationalism remain untouched.
One commentator, an official “propaganda ambassador” of Guangdong province, compared the Shenzhen attack to a 1937 incident that triggered the second Sino-Japanese war—suggesting that Japan was using the attack as an excuse to inflame conflict with China.
The commentator, Gu Yan Mu Chan, later echoed the official media argument, saying that the killing was a result of anti-China attitudes in Japan, which she said had never come clean of its historic sin.
The growth of hateful content online in China has accelerated, experts said, in part because of platforms’ technological limitations, but also because moderators can be reluctant to remove content that draws audience traffic.
“The platforms aren’t innocent,” said a former content manager of a Chinese video-sharing site.
In the days after the death of the Japanese 10-year-old, a letter that appeared to be from the boy’s father began to circulate online. He and his wife, who is Chinese, refused to hold grudges, it said.
Their son, it said, loved to draw, was passionate about insects and had “a heart more tender than anyone else’s.” The letter was spread quickly across many of China’s social-media platforms, shared by readers who described it as an antidote to toxic nationalism.
Within days, the letter had all but disappeared from the Chinese internet, a result only possible with an order from the country’s internet regulator.
A week after the stabbing, a group of Chinese activists launched a memorial campaign for the Japanese boy, calling on people worldwide to take a stand. Posters, circulating in Chinese, Japanese and English on Instagram and other overseas platforms, said, “Say No to Hate Crime.”
The organizers also asked people to do something the boy enjoyed: Draw an insect.