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international affairs Shi Yinhong proposed a “diplomatic revolution.” Both Ma and Shi
argued that China and Japan should focus on the strategic and economic benefit of their
cooperation and avoid being bogged down by the history quarrels that only involve
secondary interest. While such new thinking on Japan policy rightly points out that
containing anti-Japanese popular nationalism is in the overall interests of the Chinese
nation, it actually desires to return to Chinese strategy in the 1970s, to set history aside
for the sake of bigger, more practical gains. This strategy, however, would be far less
effective now than before because the Chinese society is no longer closed to the outside
world and public opinion is beyond the perfect official control. Even if Chinese people
can be persuaded by immediate interests to be conciliatory and restrained, they would
neither forget nor forgive Japanese aggression; in the long run their grievances against
Japan would only explode with greater scale and intensity, just like what has happened
since the 1980s.
The lesson that the two countries should learn from the postwar history is that
they can only settle the problem of history by facing it. So far war historiography
remains chiefly in the custody of politicians and ideologues in both China and Japan, and
their historians have been hardly able to carry out dialogue and joint research in a spirit of
professionalism and genuine mutual critique. Unless both countries abandon historical
mythmaking and leave history writing to conscientious historians, no other ways can stop
Chinese popular nationalism from sending Sino-Japanese relations into a downward
spiral before serious bilateral conflicts break out.
Convention