China Uses WWII History to Wedge US-Japan Alliance — SkimNews
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- Xi Jinping told Trump at the official Washington banquet that "the Chinese and American people stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight against Japanese militarist aggressors" over 80 years ago, deliberately obscuring the fact that wartime China was led by the Nationalists, not the Communists.
- Trump welcomed Xi by recalling "the greatness that we had together fighting in World War Two" without mentioning the postwar US-Japan alliance, prompting Brookings' Mireya Solis to warn the lapse "will only invite more Chinese coercion."
- Takaichi Sanae has a long record of revisionist WWII views dating to a 1994 Diet speech calling the war "legally justifiable" and pledging to revise the Murayama apology — a stance Xi pointedly challenged at their October APEC meeting in Korea.
- Wang Yi linked former Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi's late-September visit to the Tokyo war crimes trials anniversary, warning Japan "will have no future" if it revives "war criminals," in an outreach to anti-Takaichi factions inside the LDP.
- China marked last September's 80th WWII anniversary with a military parade attended by Putin and Kim Jong Un, and released the film "731" — about Japan's biological warfare unit — globally on Netflix in a direct shot at Tokyo.
- China and Russia have repeatedly blocked removal of the obsolete "enemy states" clause in the UN charter referring to Japan and Germany; Takaichi called for its removal at the General Assembly and China's deputy UN ambassador Sun Lei defended it as proof of Japan's "re-militarization."
- Mike Mochizuki of the Quincy Institute said the US-Japan security alliance has "deepened enough to prevent a US-Japan estrangement even under Trump," but conceded Japanese officials are "clearly rattled" enough that Takaichi's office had to seek post-summit clarification.
Why it matters: Japan's security establishment bonds with the US remain deep enough to prevent estrangement under Trump, but Japanese officials are "clearly rattled" as Beijing exploits Trump's historical obliviousness and Takaichi's revisionist WWII views — and China and Russia have already vetoed removing the obsolete "enemy states" UN clause, showing the history wars have institutional staying power.
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