2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations in China

Based on Wikipedia: 2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations in China

When Rocks Flew and Cars Burned

In September 2012, a Chinese man named Li Jianli made a decision that would haunt him. Driving his Toyota Corolla through the city of Xi'an, he found himself surrounded by an angry mob. They dragged him from his car and beat him so severely with a bicycle lock that he suffered permanent brain damage. His crime? Owning a Japanese-branded vehicle during the largest anti-Japanese protests China had seen in decades.

Li wasn't alone. Across more than a hundred Chinese cities that autumn, crowds numbering in the tens of thousands took to the streets. They smashed Japanese cars, ransacked Japanese department stores, and set Japanese factories ablaze. A Panasonic electronics plant in Qingdao burned. Toyota dealerships were torched. Japanese restaurants had their windows shattered. The JUSCO department store in Qingdao was so thoroughly looted that it looked like a bomb had gone off inside.

What sparked this extraordinary wave of destruction? A cluster of uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea.

Five Islands, Three Countries, Zero People

The Senkaku Islands—or the Diaoyu Islands, depending on whom you ask—are a small archipelago roughly two hundred miles northeast of Taiwan. The largest island is barely two and a half miles long. No one lives there. No one has ever really lived there. The islands have no natural freshwater, no harbor, and until recently, no particular strategic value.

Yet three governments claim them as sovereign territory.

Japan has controlled the islands since 1895, when it annexed them during the First Sino-Japanese War. China says that's exactly the problem—the islands were stolen during a period of imperial humiliation, and they rightfully belong to China. Taiwan makes essentially the same claim, arguing that the islands should have been returned to Chinese control after World War Two, along with Taiwan itself.

For most of the twentieth century, this dispute simmered quietly. The islands were too small and too remote to matter much. Then came two developments that changed everything.

First, in 1969, a United Nations survey suggested that the seabed around the islands might contain substantial oil and gas reserves. Suddenly, those barren rocks had potential worth billions.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, China's explosive economic growth transformed the country's sense of its own place in the world. A nation that had spent a century being pushed around by foreign powers was now the world's second-largest economy. Many Chinese felt it was time to settle old scores—and the Senkaku Islands represented unfinished business from Japan's brutal occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Ghosts of Manchuria

To understand why tensions peaked in September 2012, you need to understand the significance of September 18th in Chinese collective memory.

On that date in 1931, Japanese soldiers staged a fake bombing of a railway line near Mukden—now called Shenyang—and blamed it on Chinese forces. This manufactured incident, known as the Mukden Incident or the September 18th Incident, gave Japan the pretext it needed to invade Manchuria. Within months, Japanese troops had conquered China's entire northeastern region, establishing a puppet state called Manchukuo that would serve as a staging ground for Japan's wider invasion of China.

What followed was one of the most brutal occupations in modern history. The Nanjing Massacre of 1937, in which Japanese troops murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, remains seared into Chinese national consciousness. So do the chemical weapons experiments conducted on Chinese prisoners, the forced labor in Japanese mines, and the systematic destruction of Chinese cities.

Every year, September 18th brings a fresh reminder of this history. Air raid sirens sound across Chinese cities. Museums hold commemorations. Television stations broadcast documentaries about Japanese wartime atrocities.

In 2012, this annual remembrance collided with a fresh provocation.

Buying Trouble

In April 2012, Tokyo's governor Shintaro Ishihara made an announcement that would set Asia on edge. Ishihara, a right-wing nationalist known for inflammatory statements about China and Korea, declared that Tokyo's metropolitan government would purchase three of the Senkaku Islands from their private Japanese owner.

This might sound strange. How could Tokyo's mayor buy islands? But in Japan's complex system of government, prefectures and municipalities can own property, and these particular islands had been in private hands for decades. The Japanese national government had been leasing them from the Kurihara family since the 1970s.

Ishihara's move was deliberately provocative. By having Tokyo purchase the islands, he hoped to enable development—perhaps a harbor, perhaps a lighthouse, perhaps even permanent structures that would strengthen Japan's claim. The Chinese government was furious.

Trying to defuse the situation, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda proposed that the national government purchase the islands instead. His logic was that the central government would be a more responsible steward than the nationalist Ishihara. But Beijing saw no difference. As far as China was concerned, Japan was "nationalizing" stolen Chinese territory.

On September 11, 2012, Japan completed the purchase.

One week later, all hell broke loose.

The Streets Erupt

The protests began online. Chinese social media exploded with calls for nationwide demonstrations on August 19th and again on September 15th and 18th. The timing was deliberate—September 18th was the anniversary of the Mukden Incident, and protesters wanted to draw an explicit connection between Japan's historical aggression and its current territorial claims.

In Beijing, crowds gathered outside the Japanese embassy carrying banners that read "Return us the Diaoyu Islands" and "Japan must confess her crimes." In Shenzhen, protesters marched through the streets chanting "Defend the Diaoyu Islands" and "Smash Japanese Imperialism."

At first, the protests looked like standard nationalist demonstrations—loud, angry, but mostly peaceful. Then they turned violent.

In Changsha, rioters ransacked a Heiwado department store, a Japanese chain that had operated in China for nearly two decades. They methodically stripped it of merchandise, smashed display cases, and set fires in the wreckage. In Qingdao, protesters attacked more than ten Japanese-owned businesses in a single day, including a Toyota dealership that was burned to the ground. In Guangzhou, several thousand demonstrators stormed the Garden Hotel, which housed the Japanese consulate, smashing windows and attacking a Japanese restaurant inside.

The violence wasn't limited to Japanese businesses. Anyone or anything associated with Japan became a target. Chinese citizens driving Japanese-branded cars—Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans, Mazdas—found themselves surrounded by mobs who smashed windshields, slashed tires, and in some cases dragged drivers from their vehicles and beat them.

One particularly disturbing video showed a crowd in Xi'an overturning a Japanese-branded car while its owner, a middle-aged Chinese man, pleaded with them to stop. The man, Cai Yang, was beaten with a U-shaped bicycle lock. He survived but was left partially paralyzed with permanent brain damage. His attacker, a twenty-one-year-old migrant worker, was later sentenced to ten years in prison.

More Than Meets the Eye

Not everyone at the protests was there to denounce Japan.

Sharp-eyed observers noticed something peculiar in the crowds: posters of Mao Zedong. This wasn't simply nostalgia for the revolutionary era. In Chinese political discourse, invoking Mao often signals dissatisfaction with the current leadership's handling of sovereignty issues. The implicit message was that Mao would never have tolerated Japanese provocations the way today's leaders do.

Some protesters went further. Alongside the anti-Japanese banners, signs appeared criticizing government corruption, food safety scandals, and growing income inequality. Supporters of Bo Xilai—the charismatic and controversial Communist Party leader who had recently been purged—showed up to promote their fallen champion.

This phenomenon—using nationalist protests as cover for domestic political grievances—put Chinese authorities in a delicate position. They wanted to demonstrate popular anger toward Japan, but they didn't want demonstrations spiraling into criticism of the Communist Party itself.

By September 16th, the situation was getting out of hand. In Shenzhen, roughly two thousand protesters attempted to storm a Communist Party facility, hurling bottles at police and throwing rocks at vehicles parked in the compound's lot. This wasn't anti-Japanese sentiment anymore. This was something the government couldn't tolerate.

The Crackdown

Chinese authorities moved swiftly to reassert control.

Police in Xi'an banned large gatherings and prohibited using phones or online messaging to organize protests. In Shanghai, paramilitary troops provided round-the-clock protection to the Japanese consulate, confiscating projectiles from demonstrators and using megaphones to warn against violence. Anyone who showed up to protest was given only a few minutes at the site before being moved along.

Qingdao police arrested six people for violent acts. Guangzhou authorities detained eighteen and publicly asked citizens to submit evidence against other rioters. Text messages went out across Beijing warning citizens against further demonstrations. Subway stations near protest sites were closed. Police forces across the country took to Weibo—China's Twitter equivalent—to announce that rioters would face prosecution.

By September 19th, the protests had effectively ended. Japanese businesses that had shuttered their doors during the chaos cautiously reopened. The Japanese embassy in Beijing confirmed that crowds had dispersed.

The message from Chinese authorities was clear: nationalist sentiment was useful, but it could not be allowed to threaten social stability or challenge the Party's control.

Collateral Damage

The economic fallout was substantial.

Honda temporarily closed all five of its major assembly plants in China. Toyota let individual subsidiaries decide whether to shut down based on local conditions. Nissan closed two of its three Chinese factories. Sony suspended operations at two facilities. Canon shuttered three. Japanese car manufacturers estimated they lost two hundred fifty million dollars in just one week as production of roughly fourteen thousand vehicles was suspended.

Japanese retail chains suffered devastating losses. AEON, which operates shopping malls across China, saw rioters smash windows and loot merchandise, with damage at one location alone totaling nearly nine million dollars. Despite this, the company continued its expansion into China—but made a telling adjustment, focusing on selling Chinese-made goods and reducing Japanese-made products to just five percent of inventory.

Tourism took a hit as well. Chinese group tours to Japan were cancelled en masse, dealing a blow to Japanese hotels, restaurants, and retailers who had come to depend on Chinese visitors.

Perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities quietly pressured booksellers in Beijing to remove books by Japanese authors from their shelves. Publishers were discouraged from translating Japanese content. For a brief moment, it seemed as though China was attempting a cultural boycott alongside the economic one.

A Billionaire's Gesture

In the aftermath of the violence, one response stood out.

Chen Guangbiao, a flamboyant Chinese entrepreneur known for dramatic philanthropic gestures, spent more than seven hundred seventy thousand dollars of his own money to buy new Chinese-made Geely automobiles for one hundred seventy-two owners whose Japanese cars had been destroyed during the protests. It was a characteristically theatrical move—Chen was famous for publicity stunts—but it also highlighted an uncomfortable truth.

The people most hurt by the anti-Japanese violence weren't Japanese. They were ordinary Chinese citizens whose only connection to Japan was the brand of car they drove or the store where they shopped.

The International Dimension

The protests didn't stay within China's borders.

Demonstrations erupted in Chinese communities across the United States, with protests in Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. Chinese-American groups petitioned the U.S. government and Congress to take a neutral stance in the territorial dispute.

The United States found itself in an awkward position. Under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, America is obligated to help defend Japanese-administered territory—including, arguably, the Senkaku Islands. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed concern that "when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands, it raises the possibility that a misjudgment on one side or the other could result in violence and could result in conflict."

The American ambassador to China, Gary Locke, got an unexpected taste of the tensions. On September 18th, his car was blocked by protesters as he tried to enter the Japanese embassy. The crowd chanted slogans about the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, hurled bottles at his vehicle, and even grabbed the American flag. Chinese security forces dispersed the mob quickly—"It was all over in a matter of minutes," Locke later said—but the incident underscored how easily anti-Japanese sentiment could spill over into anti-American feeling.

What the Protests Revealed

The 2012 demonstrations exposed several uncomfortable realities about modern China.

First, they showed how quickly online organizing could mobilize massive crowds. The protests spread through social media faster than authorities could track, catching both the Chinese government and foreign observers off guard.

Second, they revealed the limits of nationalist mobilization as a political tool. Chinese authorities have long encouraged patriotic sentiment as a source of legitimacy for Communist Party rule. But nationalism, once unleashed, isn't easily controlled. The violence against Japanese businesses and the attempted storming of Party facilities showed how quickly protests could evolve in unpredictable directions.

Third, the protests highlighted China's complicated relationship with its own history. The raw anger on display wasn't just about a few rocky islands. It was about decades of humiliation at Japanese hands, about atrocities that have never been adequately acknowledged, about a sense that Japan has never truly apologized for what it did to China.

Finally, the protests demonstrated China's economic integration with the very country its citizens were denouncing. The Japanese factories being attacked employed Chinese workers. The Japanese cars being smashed were owned by Chinese drivers. The Japanese stores being ransacked served Chinese customers. Untangling these economic ties would hurt China as much as Japan.

A Decade Later

The Senkaku Islands dispute never really went away. China continues to send coast guard vessels into waters around the islands, testing Japanese resolve. Japan continues to scramble jets whenever Chinese aircraft approach. The possibility of a miscalculation leading to actual conflict remains real.

But the mass street protests of 2012 have not recurred. Chinese authorities learned their lesson about the dangers of unleashing popular nationalism. Social media is now far more tightly controlled, making it harder to organize spontaneous demonstrations. And the government has developed subtler tools for expressing displeasure—economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, coordinated media campaigns—that don't risk mobs attacking Communist Party buildings.

For ordinary Chinese citizens, the memory of 2012 serves as a cautionary tale. Patriotism is expected, even demanded. But there are limits. Cross them, and you might find yourself not hailed as a hero, but prosecuted as a criminal.

The man who beat Cai Yang with a bicycle lock probably thought he was defending his country's honor. Instead, he became a symbol of how nationalism can curdle into senseless violence—destroying lives while the rocks at the center of the dispute sit empty and silent, two hundred miles out to sea.