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Letting Passions Burn May Backfire on China

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Times Staff Writer

From his cramped studio apartment littered with dirty socks, old Pepsi bottles and instant noodles, Lu Yunfei has whipped up a wave of anti-Japan sentiment across China using little more than a laptop and a high-speed connection.

Since February, the 30-year-old founder of the Patriots’ Alliance website and his colleagues have collected 3.5 million signatures for a petition to block Tokyo’s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. They also object to Japan’s approval of a school textbook that critics say glosses over the nation’s wartime occupation of China and other countries in East Asia.

The effort has emboldened protesters, who have helped bring Sino-Japanese ties to their lowest point since the two nations normalized relations in 1972.

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“We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished,” Lu said. “Japan is a pirate country, and the Chinese as their victims feel insulted and worried.”

China’s ruling Communist Party, backed by a sophisticated Internet filtering system, an army of cyber-cops, a vigilant public security apparatus and an extensive informant network, is quick to shut down the slightest hint of a political movement. Yet it has allowed Patriots’ Alliance and other anti-Japan groups to galvanize the nation, leading to an outpouring of rage that has brought tens of thousands of Chinese into the streets and has prompted attacks on Japanese companies, embassies and consulates.

Behind Beijing’s apparent acquiescence was a belief that it could harness public protests to serve its own aims, analysts say. But some China experts warn that party leaders are taking a risk: public resentment, once unleashed, can be difficult to contain.

“Once you mount the tiger, it’s hard to dismount,” said Nicholas Becquelin, Hong Kong-based research director with Human Rights in China. “They made use of the nationalism but found it a little more difficult to contain than they expected once its usefulness was over.”

A meeting between President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Saturday failed to produce a breakthrough in the monthlong tensions as Hu called on Japan to back up its words of remorse with action. But China is clamping down hard on potential demonstrators, blanketing likely protest sites with a large police presence and using media controls and its extensive security machine to quell unrest.

Controversies over history and textbooks are nothing new in East Asia. Analysts say the larger issue is a battle between two powers for regional influence.

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China, one of five nations with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, has a significant interest in blocking Japan’s bid. Some say the public outcry has put Tokyo on the defensive and elicited sympathy from Southeast Asian nations occupied by Japan during World War II.

In China, the Communist Party may view the anti-Japan protests as a way to bolster its legitimacy. By fanning nationalism, analysts say, it hopes to spotlight to an angry population its role as a defender of China’s interests.

“No leader wants to be seen as weak on sovereignty issues, especially those involving Japan,” said Phillip Saunders, senior fellow at the National Defense University in Washington.

The party may have seen a benefit in allowing people to vent their anger against the Japanese, rather than at local corruption, China’s yawning rich-poor gap, land grabs by party cadres, and mounting crime.

Such tactics can be dangerous for the government, calling into question whether authorities can turn off the tap once people get a taste of empowerment. In one recent case, workers in a Japanese-run factory reportedly joined a protest, then asked for an independent labor union, which Beijing forbids.

“When Chinese start to feel such emotion, there’s a fear this could backfire against the government itself and get out of control,” said Zhu Feng, a regional security expert with Peking University. “The government is scared of these long-simmering sentiments.”

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As anger flared in China, the Japanese government sent Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura on a fence-mending trip to Beijing, looking for an apology and compensation for the damage its embassy and businessmen suffered. After Machimura returned to Tokyo empty-handed, Japan requested the Hu-Koizumi meeting.

Although the request that China pay for the damage caused by protesters may seem reasonable in Tokyo, demonstrators in Beijing and Shanghai hold different views.

Patriots’ Alliance founder Lu, who did not attend any protests, criticized Japan’s request for an apology because he said it had never fully apologized for its World War II occupation. He said the “deep remorse” expressed by Koizumi is nothing like the meaningful soul-searching done by Germany over the Holocaust.

“Japan has made serious mistakes, refuses to admit them and now wants to increase its military strength,” Lu said. “Someone who never admits something could make the same mistake again.”

Beijing has taken steps to rein in demonstrators. It issued guidelines through the media and its network of local party representatives to discourage protests. And it offered “guidance” to websites to tone down the rhetoric and reduce the number of anti-Japan postings.

Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing called for social stability last week and for an end to protests, and state media warned against illegal behavior in anti-Japan marches, saying those taking part would be punished.

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“I think we’ve seen the bulk of the protests,” said Minxin Pei, senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “From now on, local officials will be held responsible if they don’t suppress demonstrations.”

Beijing realizes it depends on Japanese investment, expertise and $212 billion in two-way trade. It could also lose international credibility if it allows protests to drag on. But it wants to avoid appearing to buckle under Japanese pressure.

Zhou Bing, 28, a computer programmer who joined more than 10,000 anti-Japan protesters in Shanghai in mid-April, said China should strive to be stronger but not a threat to its neighbors.

Even as Beijing’s short-term interests are shared by nationalist groups and people suspicious of Japan’s motives and views of history, the party considers any group or movement a potential political threat.

“Virtually every organization in China is closely monitored,” Becquelin said.

Since the late 1990s, China’s response to unrest has undergone a strategic shift, partly because of the increase in protests, said Murray Scot Tanner, a China security specialist at the Rand Corp.

Chinese government statistics show there were 58,000 protests across the country in 2003, or 158 a day, as tensions have increased over corruption, land grabs and other problems on China’s road from a planned to a market economy.

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Beijing’s focus before 1998 was generally on stopping protests at all costs, Tanner said. Now the emphasis is increasingly on learning about disturbances in advance, isolating the leadership from the rank and file, buying people off, preventing onlookers from joining and avoiding heavy-handed violence that might enrage the crowd.

One characteristic of the recent demonstrations has been the changing nature of technology. People have been alerted by cellphones and the Internet, which inform overseas supporters of the planned protest routes.

The largest protests occurred in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, where Internet and mobile phone penetration rates are the highest, not in smaller cities such as Nanjing, Qingdao and Dalian, which suffered some of the longest and greatest hardship under Japanese occupation, said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“It took almost no work to organize,” Xiao said. “In these bigger cities, technology is thoroughly part of their lifestyle.”

Lu of the Patriots’ Alliance said he had decided to form the group when he was chatting online and discovered that several people shared his outrage over Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where several war criminals are buried.

“So I proposed that we do something about it in the real world rather than just talking about it online,” Lu said.

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For several months, the website received a few dozen hits a day. The group, which now consists of several dozen volunteers, raised its profile by organizing anti-Japan demonstrations. It now receives 1 million hits daily, making it one of China’s most visited and influential anti-Japan websites.

Lu attributes its popularity in part to its moderate stance. “I guess we’ve done a good job combining passion with rationality,” he said. “Some of the other individual sites go a little crazy.”

Lu said his group had been careful about posting inflammatory or illegal messages. He said he had not been visited by or received calls from security forces. He said it was his idea to post a warning on the website against illegal protests.

“So far, I think the Chinese government has managed things pretty well,” Lu said. “They’ve allowed people to vent their anger while protecting the demonstrators, keeping order and safeguarding property.”

Yin Lijin in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

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