Whew.
Tax day is over, so I can get back to blogging!
H: on Saturday, Instapundit linked to a story about anti-Japan protests in Shanghai on 4/16, with a crowd estimated at about 10,000 very angry Chinese. If you click on the link, you see a photo from the crowd where a protestor is holding a sign reading, "Kill Japanese".
I think this kind of thing is going to get bigger before it gets smaller. The animosity between the Chinese, the Japanese and the Koreans goes back hundreds, even thousands of years.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I found out how little the students learn about history, even local (Asian) history. When I taught English to Hong Kong seventh-grade students, I asked them about their curriculum. They learned a little about Chinese history, but not much more than that. Ignorance is easy to exploit.
That being said, the Japanese forces did truly rape Nanking; the stories about the event are simply horrible. So this could become a big problem in the future.

One opinion piece I read not too long ago suggested the next significant alliance will be of countries trying to contain China. The big four would be the U.S., Japan, India and Australia. If the Europeans cozy up to China (they want to sell weapons to China - obviously China does not need these for self-defense purposes!), they could be on the other side of the alliance...
Interesting times ahead...
C
- posted by Christoph Roggenkamp @ 4/17/2005 12:12:00 PM