Two years ago this week, protesters marched outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing denouncing Japan’s nationalization of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea claimed by both China and Japan. In other Chinese cities, looters stormed Japanese businesses and owners of Japanese cars were attacked.
Things have since calmed down on the streets of Beijing, and President Xi Jinping appears to want to lower tensions ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in the Chinese capital in November. The event will be attended by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, President Obama and other world leaders.
But an annual public opinion survey conducted by the state-run newspaper China Daily and a Japanese nongovernmental group, Genron NPO, shows that bad feelings persist. A narrow majority of Chinese — 53.4 percent — believe that a war with Japan is possible “within a few years,” according to the results released on Tuesday. Fewer Japanese — 29 percent — consider conflict with China likely.
Those bleak results come as one of China’s most distinguished foreign policy scholars, Wang Jisi, warned that China should rid itself of the idea that military might and economic power will frighten its opponents into submission.
Writing in the August issue of Global and Financial News, an organ of the Chinese State Council’s Development Research Center, Mr. Wang said that China had nothing to gain from a “simultaneous downturn” in relations with Japan and the United States.
“We should overcome the idea that, once China’s economic strength and military strength are developed sufficiently to subjugate our opponents, we can then prevail over Japan and even America, and easily resolve the problems we face today,” Mr. Wang said.
China should understand, he said, that history provides little precedent for a major country bringing another country “to its knees.” Look at the American experience in Vietnam, and at the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he suggested. “These countries without exception left America in real trouble with no way out.”
Mr. Wang, who until earlier this year was director of the department of international politics at Peking University, has a habit of being prescient. In 2012, he co-wrote an article with the American scholar Kenneth G. Lieberthal, of the Brookings Institution, warning that the strategic distrust between the United States and China had already escalated to dangerous levels.
In his new article, he issues a cri de coeur, urging that the underlying warmth between Chinese and Japanese people be allowed to flourish.
“Can we promote normal social exchanges in the midst of the weariness of political stalemate? Can we consider the basics of human kindness in the midst of the long flow of history?” Mr. Wang asked. “Japan’s war guilt cannot be forgotten, but similarly the friendship and feelings of the Chinese and Japanese people cannot just be thrown to the winds.”
Within the nationalist impulses of the survey results, there were glimmers of progress. In 2013, 77.5 percent of the Chinese respondents cited the ownership of the disputed islands, known as the Diaoyu in China and as the Senkaku in Japan, as their prime concern. This year a lower percentage, 64.8, named the islands as the main cause for worry.
Still, an overwhelming majority of respondents in both countries continued to hold negative impressions of each other. Japan’s image in the eyes of the Chinese public was “bad” or “relatively bad” among 86.8 percent of the Chinese, a drop of 6 percentage points from last year’s survey. In Japan, 93 percent of those surveyed held a hostile view of China, a record high.
The slight improvement in Chinese attitudes to Japan may be because of exactly what Mr. Wang recommended — more contacts between Japanese and Chinese people.
In the first six months of this year, Chinese tourists flocked to Japan — reveling in the spring blossoms of Kyoto and relishing the smart shopping of Tokyo — in far greater numbers than in the same period in 2013. So it’s possible that positive holiday memories contributed to that small decline in negative attitudes among Chinese toward Japan.