Why China’s spat with Japan could still get worse

“For nigh on 1,000 years, the nipponese pirates feature wreaked mayhem…they observe only force, and their hearts are bursting with malice.” This month China’s armed forces released these verses on social media. As poetry, it is perhaps not the best. But the message was clear enough. To hammer it home, the poem was accompanied by a cartoon of a skeleton, wearing a Japanese army cap, trying to clutch the island of Taiwan. A giant sword, swung from China’s mainland, is cutting its head off.

This winter is the frostiest in Sino-Japanese relations for over a decade. It all started on November 7th, when Japan’s prime minister, Takaichi Sanae (pictured), was asked in the Diet about what situations could prompt Japan to exercise “collective self-defence”. The phrase refers to Japan’s proclaimed right to defend an ally with its armed forces when deemed necessary for Japan’s own survival. That would apply if China were to attack Taiwan, she suggested. China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, was furious. Its officials have piled pressure on Japan to get Ms Takaichi to retract her comments. So far, though, the government has sought to calibrate how its citizens express their anger.

As Chinese officials see it, Ms Takaichi’s comments not only infringed on its sovereignty but also resurrected the ghosts of Japan’s imperial past (Japan ruled Taiwan from 1895 until the end of the second world war and fought China for much of this period). China also claims that Japan’s ongoing military build-up—which in part is an attempt to deter its superpower neighbour—threatens regional security.

Online commenters in China are furious, too. The Economist has been monitoring the sentiment of posts mentioning Japan on Weibo, an X-like platform recently. On a scale of zero to one, where zero reflects an entirely negative statement and one a wholly positive one, average sentiment collapsed from 0.6 on November 7th to 0.3 on November 21st (see chart). That is the lowest since we started tracking at the start of the year.

China is pushing on several fronts in response. Its diplomats have harangued Japan at the United Nations. It has sent coastguard ships to islands that both countries claim (Japan calls them the Senkaku islands and China the Diaoyu). Chinese fighter jets locked their radars onto Japanese planes near Okinawa in Japan earlier in December (an act that can signal a potential attack and force evasive action). China has also imposed sanctions on a former chief of Japan’s self-defence forces.

But it is in waging economic warfare that China excels. It has placed import bans on Japanese seafood and warned Chinese citizens that it is unsafe to travel to Japan. The idea is to hurt the country’s tourism revenues (a recent report from the state-run China Daily claims Chinese tourists are changing their winter-holiday plans to go to South Korea and South-East Asia). Officials have also cancelled showings of Japanese films and performances by Japanese musicians. On November 29th Ayumi Hamasaki, a singer, performed in an empty 14,000-seat stadium in Shanghai after organisers axed her show at the last minute. A day earlier another Japanese star was forced to leave the stage in mid-performance.

During previous disputes the Chinese government encouraged people to boycott Japanese shops and restaurants, too. This time it has not done that. The Chinese public, though angry at Japan, seem happy to keep consuming its products. Ms Mao, a middle-aged Beijinger, has gone on holiday to Japan in the past. She now deems the country unsafe, because of the spat. “But I’ll still buy what I want to buy,” she says, eyeing perfumed candles in Muji, a Japanese household-goods shop. Nearby, the main Beijing branch of Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing retailer, was full of shoppers on a recent afternoon. When Sushiro, a Japanese sushi chain, opened new joints in Shanghai this month, long queues formed outside. Toyota sales in China have been steady so far this year.

China may be unwilling to unleash nationalist fury, which can be hard to control. During another spat, in 2012, over the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, thousands of Chinese took to the streets, smashing Japanese restaurants and cars. Such scenes seem unlikely to happen today because officials increasingly prize political stability. And they may also be wary of doing anything that might further weaken consumer sentiment. In November retail sales grew by just 1.3%, the slowest pace since 2022. Alternatively, officials may just be keeping their powder dry. “The struggle against Japan could be a protracted one,” warned Hu Xijin, a well-known nationalist, on Weibo last month.

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