China’s Tourism Strike on Japan Carries the Weight of Twenty Million Dead
Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi spoke in the plain language of security law. A Chinese move on Taiwan, she told the Diet, would be a “situation that threatens Japan’s survival” and could justify the use of force. In Tokyo this sounded like doctrine. In Beijing it sounded like history trying to stand up again.
Chinese airlines then began to cancel flights to Tokyo and Osaka. Group tours were wiped from agency schedules in Shanghai and Chengdu. Within days the biggest outbound market in Asia turned away from Japan. Officially the explanation was a worsening climate for Chinese visitors. In practice the message was simpler. A neighbour that once killed tens of millions of Chinese was again talking about entering a conflict that China regards as its own.
The wound that still shapes China
The scale of what Japan did in China
During the long war that began in the nineteen thirties and ended in nineteen forty five, Chinese and foreign estimates converge on a catastrophe. Official Chinese figures speak of around thirty five million casualties, including more than twenty million dead. Entire regions were stripped of people as bombing, famine and occupation set in.
Historians who study the Three Alls policy in the north of China describe a campaign with a simple order: kill all, burn all, take all. Research by Mitsuyoshi Himeta and others points to millions of civilians killed in that campaign alone. Chinese accounts add perhaps ninety million refugees pushed out of their homes during the fighting. In Chinese schools this is not presented as one front among many. It is presented as a national near death experience.
That is the memory into which Takaichi’s remark dropped. It did not land in a vacuum of opinion polling. It landed in a society where the war against Japan is still presented as the central proof that weakness invites disaster. When a Japanese leader invokes national survival in the context of a conflict that touches Chinese territory, Chinese citizens hear an old justification returning.
The atrocities that became foundation stories
Nanjing and Unit seven three one
In Nanjing in nineteen thirty seven Japanese troops turned the captured capital into a killing ground. For around six weeks the city saw mass executions, burning districts and systematic rape. Scholarly estimates differ, ranging from one hundred thousand to more than two hundred thousand dead, while China has fixed on the figure of three hundred thousand as the emblematic number. However one counts, Chinese public life treats Nanjing as the sharpest point of the blade.
Further north, Unit seven three one became the symbol of something even colder. In the fields outside Harbin doctors in uniform used Chinese civilians as material for biological research. People were infected with plague and cholera, frozen, bomb tested and cut open on the operating table. Thousands died inside the compound and many more in the surrounding countryside as weapons were tested in villages and towns. The site is now a museum that every schoolchild knows. The lesson is explicit. This is what happens when Japan’s militarists are free of restraint.
These are not private memories. They are stitched into museums, textbooks and television dramas. The Nanjing memorial and the museum at the Unit seven three one site are used for official visits and patriotic education. Party cadres, young officers and school groups walk past photographs and relics that link wartime Japan with the idea of racial contempt and experimental cruelty.
From that point of view, Japan did something after the Second World War that Germany did not. Germany put its leaders on trial at Nuremberg, dismantled Nazi organisations, and made the Holocaust central to its national education. Symbols and denial were pushed to the margins of politics. Japan went in a different direction. The emperor remained. Many wartime officials came back into public life. Apologies were issued, but competing narratives were also allowed to flourish.
The reckoning that never fully came
Why China says Japan never had its reckoning
Japanese governments have issued formal statements of remorse, most famously the Murayama statement of nineteen ninety five and later words from Junichiro Koizumi. These documents acknowledge aggression and express sorrow for the suffering caused. On paper they look similar to the language used in Europe.
What China sees in practice is something else. Prime ministers and cabinet ministers have paid visits to the Yasukuni shrine where convicted war criminals are honoured. Fights over school textbooks have led to softer language on atrocities. Nationalist politicians have questioned casualty figures at Nanjing or spoken of the war as a mission to liberate Asia. The result, in the Chinese reading, is that apology has never become irreversible. It can be spoken for foreign audiences and then diluted at home.
That is why Chinese commentators say Japan never had its own Nuremberg moment. There was punishment, but no deep social quarantine of the wartime ideology. From this perspective, a Japanese leader who speaks about using force in a Taiwan conflict is not treated as a post war German chancellor would be. She is treated as the latest voice from a political culture that never fully buried its past.
There is an uncomfortable truth that does not fit neatly into either narrative. Japan’s fears are real. People in Okinawa live with the memory of mass civilian deaths in the final year of the war, and with modern bases that place them on the front line of any clash over Taiwan. Japanese planners see a narrow strait, expanding Chinese forces and the possibility that conflict to the south will bring fire to their own islands.
Yet in Beijing this is not seen as a reason for Japan to take a larger role. It is seen as the cost of Japan’s own history and alliance choices. In Chinese eyes, Japan was given a light sentence after nineteen forty five and chose to shelter under American power without ever fully facing its record in Asia. Now, when Tokyo moves closer to the front of a Taiwan confrontation, China treats that as a decision to reopen an unfinished chapter.
Economic oxygen as discipline
The tourism boycott is a neat demonstration of who holds leverage. Before the row, roughly one visitor in five arriving in Japan came from China. Tourism as a whole has been worth a significant share of Japanese output in recent years. The withdrawal of Chinese groups and the cancellation of flights matter for hotels, retailers and local authorities. Analysts in Tokyo warn of losses that could reach several trillion yen if the freeze continues through the next year.
China can route around the loss. Outbound tourists can be nudged toward South Korea, Southeast Asia or domestic resorts. Airlines can shift capacity. Agencies can sell different packages. The people who cancel their holidays in Kyoto will still go somewhere. What changes is where their money lands.
Beijing presents this as a matter of safety and dignity. Official notices speak of a deteriorating climate for Chinese citizens in Japan and warn travellers to consider the security situation. State outlets go further, linking Takaichi’s remark to revived militarism and asking why Chinese tourists should spend freely in a country whose leader speaks loosely about intervention in a core Chinese red line.
From Beijing’s point of view this is not an economic tantrum. It is a lesson. The boycott says to Japan: you are not an indispensable partner, you are a choice. If your leaders cross certain lines of memory, that choice can be withdrawn. It also says to the Chinese public: the Party remembers the war and is prepared to act on that memory in ways that do not require shells or missiles.
Memory, Taiwan and the next step
The heart of the dispute is the gap between how Tokyo and Beijing see Taiwan. Tokyo views it through alliance planning and sea lanes. Beijing views it through the story it tells about the century of humiliation, the anti Japanese war and the recovery of lost territory in nineteen forty five. One side sees an island that protects its southern flank. The other sees the last unresolved fragment of a century of foreign intrusion.
Set that against the way Chinese citizens have been taught to understand Japanese behaviour. In that story, Japan used the language of necessity and survival to justify conquest, left tens of millions dead, escaped full reckoning, and now reassures its allies with talk of constitutional limits while edging back toward a more normal military role. Takaichi’s sentence brought that entire story back into the present.
The cancellations are only the surface. Underneath, Beijing is fusing history, economic power and information control into a single response. Chinese travellers are told to stay away. Editors remind readers of Nanjing and Unit seven three one. Officials give interviews about the danger of Japanese militarism. The message to Tokyo is quiet but clear. You can talk this way if you want. There will be a price.
If the confrontation stays at the level of tourism, Tokyo can absorb the hit. If rhetoric hardens and military planning moves closer to the line, the risk is that the ghosts that now march through Chinese museums begin to shape moves at sea and in the air. By the time that happens, cancelled flights will look like the gentlest form of pressure that Beijing was prepared to use.
You may also like to read on Telegraph.com
America’s chip blockade and the rise of Chinese self reliance
How United States export controls turned into an accelerator for China’s own semiconductor system.
Fujian and the end of American naval monopoly
Why China’s newest carrier is designed as a steel argument in the struggle over sea power and the Taiwan Strait.
Old fighters turned into drone swarms
How China’s conversion of J six and MiG nineteen airframes shows a new way to fight a high cost war at low cost.
Chinese generals and the battle for Taiwan
A retired commander explains how Beijing believes unification can be achieved with conventional weapons alone.
This island was our moat, now it is a target
An examination of how Taiwan’s defences and China’s countermeasures are reshaping the first island chain.
From Caracas to the Arctic, a new map emerges
How events from Venezuela to the polar regions reveal the slow turn toward a more crowded world order.
London fears tunnels under the new Chinese embassy
What the British argument over Beijing’s new site in London really says about power and anxiety.
Europe’s Nexperia seizure and the China tech war
How Dutch emergency law became a tool in Washington’s struggle with Beijing over chips and control.
The real artificial intelligence arms race is energy
Why China’s grid and power build out may matter more than any single chip in the contest for computation.
In Tianjin, Putin finds old friends and new alignments
How China hosts Russia and India to signal a different centre of gravity in world politics.
References
| Source | Relevance |
|---|---|
| International Military Tribunal for the Far East | Evidence on Nanjing, command responsibility and civilian casualties. |
| Studies of the Three Alls policy and rural campaigns | Research by Mitsuyoshi Himeta and others on civilian deaths and scorched earth tactics. |
| Chinese state archives on the War of Resistance | Official casualty and refugee figures and the narrative used in education. |
| Unit seven three one museum and related scholarship | Documentation of human experimentation and biological attacks in occupied China. |
| Murayama statement and later Japanese government apologies | Text of official expressions of remorse and their use in diplomacy. |
| Recent reporting on the China Japan tourism boycott | Airline cancellation data, visitor flows and estimates of losses for the Japanese economy. |
| Commentary in Xinhua, People’s Daily and PLA outlets | Chinese framing of Takaichi’s remark as a revival of militarism and a threat of force. |
