Laura Neack The New Foreign Policy, Power Seeking in a Globalized Era (2008)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Many popular Chinese websites began a petitioncampaign in February against the Japanese.By the beginning of April, thePublic Opinion and Media 113websites claimed they had gathered twenty-two million signatures thatthey would present to the U.N.secretary general as proof that world (butmostly Chinese) opinion was against a permanent seat for Japan.The pri-mary reason given for this was Japan s lack of serious remorse and retri-bution for its wartime atrocities.China was not known (and still is not known) for its unrestricted Inter-net.Large Internet providers engage in self-censorship in order to avoidChinese government sanctions.Thus, the online campaign was seen as fa-cilitated by the government to serve its own purposes. By allowing mil-lions of people to sign their names to a petition against Japan, Beijing snew leadership seemed determined to show that recent Japanese actionshad so inflamed popular sentiment that China had no choice but to adopta tougher diplomatic line. 2 The website organizers soon joined studentand business groups in orchestrating street protests against the Japanese.The first of these protests occurred against Japanese businesses in Shen-zhen, but spread within a week to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing andconsular offices and businesses in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.In previousyears, the Chinese government had encouraged street protests to show itsanger, for instance, over the 1999 U.S.bombing of the Chinese Embassy inBelgrade, Yugoslavia.3 The anti-Japanese protests were encouraged byChinese official statements that the Japanese had no one but themselvesto blame.A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, Japan must con-scientiously and appropriately deal with its history of invading China[which is] a major issue of principle involving the feelings of the Chinesepeople. 4 These allegedly spontaneous protests by the Chinese peoplewere called off after a couple of weeks by the government, using both per-suasion and intimidation to indicate that enough was enough.Chinesecitizens were warned by text messages from the police that further protestswould not be tolerated.5Many issues drove the problematic relations between the Chinese andJapanese in this period.These included Japanese claims to some islandsand oil reserves in the South China Sea, the increased nationalism ofJapanese leadership, the new textbooks already mentioned, and Japan sbid for a permanent seat in the U.N.Security Council.At the same time,China had replaced the United States as Japan s primary export market in2004; and China s economy had helped pull the sluggish Japanese econ-omy out of recession. 6 We might, then, think about the anti-Japaneseprotests as a negotiating tool of the Chinese government in its dealingswith the Japanese.Japanese commentators were more quick to blame theChinese educational system for the protests.The protests were testimonyto the impact of the Chinese government s intensely patriotic educationsystem that has imbued the public with anti-Japan sentiment. 7 One may114 Chapter 7wonder what will happen between the two countries when Japan s neweducation reform laws aimed at instilling greater patriotism get imple-mented and take hold.There is a lot to discuss in this case, but let s limit ourselves to Chineseprotests as a reflection of public opinion.The Internet protests and laterstreet protests were not organized by the Chinese government.Theseseemed to have been genuine reflections of public opinion on Japan.Yet,the Internet and street protests would not have been tolerated for as longas they were if the Chinese government did not find them useful in con-structing its policy toward Japan.One of the most basic questions in thestudy of public opinion and foreign policy is: Does public opinion influ-ence and shape a government s foreign policy, or does the government in-fluence and shape the form of public opinion on foreign policy issues?The Chinese case suggests that the answer is a little bit of both that therelationship between the public and foreign policy decision making iscomplicated.The Chinese case also demonstrates that public opinion mat-ters to governments, even in nondemocratic systems.DIFFERENT VIEWS ON THE PUBLICThe relationship between public opinion and foreign policy making iscomplicated.Scholars and policy makers offer different views on this re-lationship, but not views that are always compatible.Some of the earlyforeign policy studies on public opinion focused on whether the publicheld a structured, coherent view on foreign policy matters.In a 1950study, Gabriel Almond established one strong position in the scholarshipby contending that American citizens were ignorant of foreign policy is-sues and that their opinions lacked structure and content.8 This left thepublic open to volatile mood changes.According to Ulf Bjereld and Ann-Marie Ekengren, in the 1970s other scholarship took the position thatthere was structure, coherence, and stability to the public s foreign policyviews [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki