Benjamin Robertson: A Frontlines Report of the Chinese Protests of Japanese Textbooks

One Chinese protester at last week's anti-Japan demonstrations delighted in scuffling with the police every time they half-heartedly tried to block the road. The high-school dropout with dreadlocked hair looked like your typical anti-establishment rebel. But then, what was such a "rebel" doing at a flag-waving nationalist rally?

This was just one of the many contradictions that stood out on that warm Saturday afternoon, as I walked among some 10,000 Chinese on their way to besiege the Japanese Embassy.

One of a series of nationwide protests against Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council -- and a number of controversial history books that allegedly whitewash Japan's wartime actions -- by some estimates the march in Beijing was the largest since the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Yet in a country where protests of any size are rarely permitted, no protesters I interviewed had stopped to consider whether their march was merely serving as an extension of government policy, or that their attitudes toward Japan had been in part crafted by the government-run education system and compliant national media.

I also wonder what people who witnessed the protests with their own eyes thought of the sudden media blackout imposed after the demonstration. Clearly feeling that the current round of protests had made their point, some Chinese newspapers were apparently forbidden from carrying news of this demonstration, and several anti-Japanese Web sites were temporarily shut down. This just provides further evidence that the government controls the outlets for the people's nationalist emotions, and like a tap, can turn them on or off at will.

In this bizarre atmosphere whose mood ranged from violent to carnivalesque, some protesters seemed unclear about what they were even angry about. Upon learning that I was a British journalist, the aforementioned dreadlocked protester, who refused to give his name, confronted me with a hostile glare and a question that I have been asked by so many mainlanders that it has begun to sound like a party line: "Why is Tony Blair so close to President Bush?"

"That's not important right now, we are all here to protest the Japanese," was the exasperated retort of fellow protestor Liu Yu, a somewhat more thoughtful graduate student at a prestigious Chinese academy. Prior to the rally, Mr. Liu frantically sent text messages to friends and family, encouraging them to boycott Japanese products. A text message sent to me read: "On May 1, stop buying Japanese goods for one month. For every $12 of Japanese goods you don't buy Japan has to cut back on 10 bullets and eight pages of history propaganda" -- a rather simplistic view of resource allocation. It's also remarkable that the well-educated Mr. Liu had completely overlooked the fact that Japanese companies on the mainland employ over a million Chinese, and many Japanese products, like the rest of the world, now carry the "Made in China" label.

The crowd, which was largely jovial, had a few strident exceptions. "The Japanese are disgraceful, I want to fight them. I want to beat up a Japanese person as my ability to endure them has reached its limits," screamed Liu Qing into my tape recorder after she literally ripped it from my fingers. But despite the variations in emotional intensity, most of the protesters had one important thing in common: age. After spending eight hours on the road last Saturday, I did not see one person marching who looked over 40. In a protest that claimed to be about World War II history, it is remarkable that those with personal recollections of that history largely failed to come out....