The escalating wave of anti-Japanese protests in China ought to be worrying Beijing, too

This has been a week in which we don’t know where to turn when it comes to "breaking news" which might affect our people and our country.

Yesterday’s transportation strike surely inconvenienced thousands of commuters, but the strikers won no sympathy for themselves, especially since they began attacking buses, jeepneys and even tricycles to coerce them into "joining" the strike.

The police should have cracked down more forcefully on the troublemakers, busted a couple of heads if they fought back, and carted the rest of those violent-types off to jail. In short, our government must deliver a strong message that everyone may have the right to protest, but they’ve no business forcing others to join their protest, or damaging vehicles and attacking drivers who’re only trying to serve the commuting public. Some would-be saboteurs in our society may, yesterday, have been trying to test the government’s resolve prior to even bigger riots and bolder attempts to disrupt our society. I don’t believe our authorities acted resolutely enough – it looked to me that too much tolerance was exhibited.

This being the only predominantly Catholic country in Asia, much attention is now focused on the 115 Cardinals meeting in Conclave in the Vatican to choose the next Pope. Everyone’s wondering who’ll be elected presumably with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to be the Vicar of Christ and successor to the late John Paul II who reigned colorfully and with chutzpah for 26 years.

They may, indeed, have voted during the night in the Sistine Chapel to elect the next Supreme Pontiff by now – but nobody in the past has been chosen on the first two or three ballots, so the praying and voting (and campaigning?) will still be going on today, I’ll wager.

I won’t even try to guess. It’s the hands of God and the Cardinals – as the case may be. In the meantime, no less than 6,000 journalists and media-persons are in Rome watching, and waiting for the outcome, along with our two major television networks.

There has been too much hortatory talk about what kind of Pope we need for our times. This is the same kind of discussion which attended the Conclave of March 1939 after the "tough-minded, unyielding, and vigorous, in the defense of the institutional rights of the Church in the age of dictators," Pope Pius XI (Papa Achille Ratti), died. My late father had been made a Papal Knight by Pius XI, but the man who had escorted him to his Papal audience had been the then Holy Father’s Secretary, Eugenio Pacelli (secretary of state since 1929).

There will always be a debate over whether Pacelli, known for being too diplomatic and prone to hesitations, ought to have been elected Pope Pius XII. He was later criticized, despite his obvious holiness of character and spirit, as being too soft on Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, when he could have spoken out more categorically against the persecution of people the Nazis scorned as Untermenschen and the holocaust inflicted on the Jews. Now the remark of a British Minister of the time, as quoted by Peter and Margaret Hebblethwaite in The Next Pope comes to mind. The conclusion of the authors was that Pius XII was "not a Pope for wartime," as the British Minister had observed. In that critical period "one needed not a Pastor Angelicus ("angelic pastor") – the Malachy-prompted name – but a Leo Furibundus ("a raging lion").

What kind of Pope will God and the Cardinals give us this time? Mute, we await their verdict.

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We welcome, of course, today’s visit of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, but most of our attention must continue to be focused on what’s happening in China, specifically the increasingly huge anti-Japanese demonstrations which seem to be spinning out of control.

We have no problems to resolve with Pakistan, and General Musharraf, although no democrat really, is . . . well, our ally in the fight against terrorism. The Pakistani leader has himself survived an assassination attempt by Islamic radicals, but I’m not altogether sure whether or not some elements in Pakistan, including "intelligence", may be protecting and concealing Osama bin Laden somewhere "safe". In any event, President Musharraf is certainly rejoicing in last weekend’s diplomatic "triumph" in New Delhi, where he met (ostensibly after going there for a cricket match, which Pakistan won) with India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The newsreel cameras caught them fervently holding hands, and, after discussions, Mr. Singh announced that the "peace process is irreversible."

Having covered both countries and visited Kashmir many years ago, I’m inclined to take such upbeat hyperbole with the proverbial grain of salt, including General Pervez’s own enthusiasm expressed to journalists over the dialogue, but heck – going an extra mile for peace after half a century of bitter hostility may be what’s needed in this awful world. Hope spring eternal, even though, at times, the spring threatens to dry up.

But back to China and Japan.

By this time, it’s beginning to appear – although certainly Beijing not merely tolerated but encouraged the first anti-Japanese demonstrations – that the anti-Japanese frenzy in that vast land of 1.3 billion Chinese has taken on a life of its own.

For me, the last straw was the demonstration in Shenyang (the former Mukden) in Manchuria in which 10,000 marchers furiously attacked the Japanese Consulate and a Japanese owned department store. I could understand 20,000 angry demonstrators, chanting "Japanese pigs get out!" rampaging in Shanghai last Saturday, stoning Japan’s consulate, smashing shops and overturning cars, in a protest against new "textbooks" in Japan and Japan’s continuing distortion of the facts of history. Shanghai during the war years had always been a center for anti-Japanese sentiment and ferment.

At the same time, no less than 10,000 people surged in anti-Japanese protest in Hangzhou, a former Imperial city not far from Shanghai in the honeymoon West Lake area – the tea capital, by the way, of China. These are all areas I know fairly well.

But Shenyang used to be part of Japanese-controlled Manchukuo – a Japanese "province" for many decades in the past.

This is the third week of anti-Japanese demonstrations in China – first in Beijing, Shenzen, Guangzhou and finally Tianjin. This week, hundreds of Chinese policemen this time blanketed Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing just outside the Forbidden City. The demonstrators were reportedly planning to march on that world-famous square.

I think this was the signal for China’s leadership to grow worried about the Genie they may have let loose from the bottle, or, to use a more pertinent analogy, the "eye" they had painted on the Dragon to bring it alive. It was in Tiananmen that the Chinese Communist leadership had to crack down with troops and tanks to stamp out that massive student-worker demonstration of 1989 which brought China infamy in the eyes of the world. A repeat of that incident will do them no good.

The trip to Beijing of Japan’s Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura to ask for an "apology" from the Chinese and restitution for the damage done was, of course, doomed from the start. He should have saved the money spent for the venture and stayed at home for all the good, nil, his mission accomplished. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (who used to be an aide of the late Chairman Deng Xiaoping) huffily dismissed Tokyo’s demand for an apology and compensation, asserting, "The Chinese government has never done anything for which it has to apologize."

There’s no doubt that the current wave of demonstrations had ab initio the blessings of the government, much as they deny any hand in instigating them. No demonstration ever takes place in Communist China – and it’s still Communist despite its capitalistic-looking prosperity and smiling face – without government permission.

The websites buzzed with furious anti-Japanese rhetoric for weeks, even giving "demonstrators" the place and time of assembly – and nothing on the website can be placed without tacit approval of the big bosses in Beijing.

Obviously, China wants to block any prospect of Japan securing a chair in the vital United Nations Security Council (Tokyo’s latest ambition), the spectre of a Washington-Tokyo alliance against China (Beijing’s latest trauma and bogeyman), the exploration for oil in disputed waters off Shanghai, et cetera. But the demonstrations may have spiralled out of control.

Worst of all, those demonstrations – growing in scope and fury – may subtly be directed at the Chinese government itself. A repressed people may be letting off steam in the only way they find open to them, when the ultimate object of their wrath is the hegemony against which thus far, with painful memories of the Tiananmen massacre and its bloody aftermath still fresh in their minds, they find themselves helpless. Up to a point. Remember what Mao Zedong himself once warned: "All China is littered with dry faggots awaiting a spark."

The Japanese textbook controversy we will always have. In the late 1970s I vividly remember the angry demonstrations in China and South Korea and the protests against the "rewriting" of history by textbook authors in Tokyo. They charged then that Japan was embarked on a new era of militarism because of phrases referring to the "invasion" of China by Japan being amended to a mere Japanese "advance" into China, et cetera. Japan’s tatamae approach and its textbook "amnesia" has long vexed this writer, and I’ve written a dozen articles assailing it over the past two decades. But this week’s riots should concern us even more greatly.

For a rise in Chinese "nationalism" and xenophobia, since China is now so economically vigorous and militarily militant, poses a danger to us all here in Asia, within this giant nation’s geographical sphere.

But not as much danger as it poses, it must be said, to the regime itself in Beijing.