With millennia of influence and perhaps only decades of war between them, surely both sides can see things another way

AT A restaurant just up the street from Japan’s embassy on Sunday, September 23rd, local diners were lining up to take advantage of a regular weekend buffet that features tempura, sashimi, sushi and other Japanese delicacies. Just inside the door stood two prominently displayed Chinese national flags. Restaurant staff said business was getting back to normal, but added that it might recover more quickly if both ends of their street were not still blocked off by military-style barricades and police standing watch in full riot gear. The anti-Japanese protests which roiled several Chinese cities last week have subsided, but the situation remains tense. The emotion and vitriol unleashed against Japan during last week’s demonstrations was a reminder that anti-Japanese nationalism remains a potent—and potentially destabilising—force in China. Zhou Enlai once characterised the relationship between the two countries as “2,000 years of friendship and five decades of misfortune”. The latter referring to the period that began with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and lasted to the end of Japan’s occupation of China at the end of the second world war. The history of Japan’s invasion of China, in particular, remains a painful and traumatic memory for many Chinese, including very many who were not yet born at the time. Old wounds from that era are kept fresh through the media, in television dramas and movie plots, as well as in the “patriotic history” curriculum taught in the mainland’s schools. Zhou’s 2,000 years of friendship refers to a long history of cultural cross-pollination. Chinese historians never tire of listing the many contributions China made to the development of Japanese politics, literature, religion and culture. Buddhism represented a key conduit for the exchange of intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic ideas between China and Japan.

Even in the bleak years that followed Japan’s humiliating defeat of the Qing empire in 1895—a defeat which resulted in China’s cession of both Taiwan and the chain of islets currently in dispute—thousands of Chinese students went abroad to study in Japan. Their numbers included Chiang Kai-shek, the author Lu Xun, and the female revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin. Sun Yat-sen travelled there many times, organising the Chinese overseas students and recruiting among them for his Revolutionary Alliance.

In Japan students learned about medicine, science and the social sciences, and along the way they adopted a new vocabulary to describe the modern world. Literally. Japanese translators used their version of a Chinese Buddhist term sekai (Chinese: shijie), a combination of characters which indicated a distinction in time and space and was used to mean “generation”, and adapted it to mean “the world,” replacing the older Chinese term tianxia, or “all under Heaven”. Last month a programme director for CCTV 1, Xu Wenguang, reminded his microblog followers of the staggering number of Chinese words, especially in the social sciences, which were likewise reimported from Japan. Japanese translators in the 19th and 20th centuries, faced with the daunting challenge posed by concepts like “society”, “philosophy” and “economics”, often simply borrowed classical Chinese phrases, imbuing them with new meaning along the way—creating what Victor Mair, a Sinologist, refers to as “round-trip words”. Centuries after Japanese culture had incorporated Chinese characters as a major component of its own writing system, Chinese students would return from Japan with a new lexicon for scholarship of their own.

Nor were the preceding 2,000 years always ones of friendship.

In the seventh century, the forces of Tang China clashed with Japanese armies in the Battle of Baekgang. The two-day battle, fought along the Geum river on the Korean peninsula, bore many of the hallmarks that would characterise future conflicts. It began as a proxy war, with China and Japan lining up behind rival powers that were vying for control of the Korean peninsula. This was to be the first of many contests China and Japan would fight in which Korea played the role of a prize.

In the 13th century, the armies of Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan empire, carried out a pair of major raids against the Japanese “home islands” (pictured above, courtesy Fukuda Taika). Hopelessly outmatched by the Mongols, the Japanese defenders dug in and prayed. Successfully, as it were, for both times the Mongol fleets suffered enormous damage from sudden storms, divine winds that became known in Japanese as the kamikaze.

During the latter years of the Ming empire, the armies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched repeated attacks against Korea as part of a grander plan to conquer the mainland. The Koreans called on the Ming court to protect them. The result was a brutal war, featuring the use of early firearms and cannon. The casualties were enormous and the damage proved crippling to both sides—but especially to the Ming empire, which had already begun its final decline. Hideyoshi died in 1598, ending, at least for the moment, visions of a Japanese empire on the mainland.

In 1894, China and Japan once again found themselves backing opposed Korean factions and, once again, China—this time in the form of the Qing empire—saw itself acting in defence of a tributary state. Twenty-six years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan was undertaking an aggressive programme to modernise its industry and its army. It was also eager to join the ranks of Europe’s imperialist nations. The Japanese victory dealt a terrible blow to both China’s national pride and to those officials who had worked for decades to modernise China’s own military and industrial bases. It also sparked a crisis of confidence among China’s reformist elite. Never before had the Chinese nation seemed in greater danger of being carved up and divided among the world’s imperial powers.

In a web chat posted last week, two of our editors remarked on the similarities between 21st-century Asia and 19th-century Europe. There are parallels there, to be sure, but what is happening today between China and Japan can also be seen as the latest chapter in a centuries-old rivalry between the two pre-eminent powers in North-East Asia.

If that history of conflict and violent competition seems to suggest a stormy course ahead in Sino-Japanese relations, an equally deep history of co-operation and cultural exchange must be borne in mind too. It might offer hope that China and Japan can find some way to reconcile their grievances and work together to keep a prosperous peace in the region—even when the newspaper headlines do not.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)