China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy
By DAVID BARBOZA
The New York Times, August 15, 2010
SHANGHAI — After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.
The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.
Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.
“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”
For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States.
But while Japan’s economy is mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and is far from developed, analysts say, meaning it has a much lower standard of living, as well as a lot more room to grow. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was about $2.3 trillion, about half of Japan’s.
This country has roughly the same land mass as the United States, but it is burdened with a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources.
Its per capita income is more on a par with those of impoverished nations like Algeria, El Salvador and Albania — which, along with China, are close to $3,600 — than that of the United States, where it is about $46,000.
Yet there is little disputing that under the direction of the Communist Party, China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions by virtue of its growing dominance of trade, its huge hoard of foreign exchange reserves and United States government debt and its voracious appetite for oil, coal, iron ore and other natural resources.
China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals.
“They’re exerting a lot of influence on the global economy and becoming dominant in Asia,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell and former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “A lot of other economies in the region are essentially riding on China’s coat tails, and this is remarkable for an economy with a low per capita income.”
In Japan, the mood was one of resignation. Though increasingly eclipsed by Beijing on the world stage, Japan has benefited from a booming China, initially by businesses moving production there to take advantage of lower wages and, as local incomes have risen, by tapping a large and increasingly lucrative market for Japanese goods.
Beijing is also beginning to shape global dialogues on a range of issues, analysts said; for instance, last year it asserted that the dollar must be phased out as the world’s primary reserve currency.
And while the United States and the European Union are struggling to grow in the wake of the worst economic crisis in decades, China has continued to climb up the economic league tables by investing heavily in infrastructure and backing a $586 billion stimulus plan.
This year, although growth has begun to moderate a bit, China’s economy is forecast to expand about 10 percent — continuing a remarkable three-decade streak of double-digit growth.
“This is just the beginning,” said Wang Tao, an economist at UBS in Beijing. “China is still a developing country. So it has a lot of room to grow. And China has the biggest impact on commodity prices — in Russia, India, Australia and Latin America.”
There are huge challenges ahead, though. Economists say that China’s economy is too heavily dependent on exports and investment and that it needs to encourage greater domestic consumption — something China has struggled to do.
The country’s largely state-run banks have recently been criticized for lending far too aggressively in the last year while shifting some loans off their balance sheet to disguise lending and evade rules meant to curtail lending growth.
China is also locked in a fierce debate over its currency policy, with the United States, European Union and others accusing Beijing of keeping the Chinese currency, the renminbi, artificially low to bolster exports — leading to huge trade surpluses for China but major bilateral trade deficits for the United States and the European Union. China says that its currency is not substantially undervalued and that it is moving ahead with currency reform.
Regardless, China’s rapid growth suggests that it will continue to compete fiercely with the United States and Europe for natural resources but also offer big opportunities for companies eager to tap its market.
Although its economy is still only one-third the size of the American economy, China passed the United States last year to become the world’s largest market for passenger vehicles. China also passed Germany last year to become the world’s biggest exporter.
Global companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors and Siemens — as well as scores of others — are making a more aggressive push into China, in some cases moving research and development centers here.
Some analysts, though, say that while China is eager to assert itself as a financial and economic power — and to push its state companies to “go global” — it is reluctant to play a greater role in the debate over climate change or how to slow the growth of greenhouse gases.
China passed the United States in 2006 to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which scientists link to global warming. But China also has an ambitious program to cut the energy it uses for each unit of economic output by 20 percent by the end of 2010, compared to 2006.
Assessing what China’s newfound clout means, though, is complicated. While the country is still relatively poor per capita, it has an authoritarian government that is capable of taking decisive action — to stimulate the economy, build new projects and invest in specific industries.
That, Mr. Lardy at the Peterson Institute said, gives the country unusual power. “China is already the primary determiner of the price of virtually every major commodity,” he said. “And the Chinese government can be much more decisive in allocating resources in a way that other governments of this level of per capita income cannot.”
Hiroko Tabuchi contributed from Tokyo.
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Monday, August 16, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Currency manipulation: the case of China
China, Currency Manipulation and Globalism: The Big Backstory
Eric Ehrmann
The Hunfington Post, June 23, 2010
During the Cold War diplomats called US-China relations peaceful coexistence. Now, as G-20 nations again gather to sort out the flotsam and jetsam of the Bretton Woods system and mediate globalist greed, that coexistence has shape shifted into economic warfare.
While US treasury secretary Tim Geithner and his minions were buzzing up Chinese "currency manipulation" and linking it to AFL-CIO leader Rich Trumka's too little too late fulminations about loss of American jobs, Beijing orchestrated a two percent swing in the renminbi-dollar rate that has justifiably dampened profit taking by speculators and replicates renminbi market spreads against the Euro, the Japanese yen and the Brazilian real.
For those whose attention spans reside in the Tweetstream this classic, big government quick-fix sets up a back to the future paradigm for a failed post World War II economic order that was created largely by agents of Soviet -- not Chinese -- communism operating inside the US government like Harry Dexter White and his communist sympathizer counterpart John Maynard Keynes who was a consultant to the Bank of England which was still privately operated at that time. Ironically China was living in the era of the "backyard blast furnace" when Bretton Woods was rolled out and it is no secret that Chairman Mao's organization received US funding to conduct anti-Japanese operations during World War II .
The fact that business-to-business solutions alone can't fix the current set of monetary problems linked to sovereign debt flies in the face of the Capitalism 4.0 paradigm being floated by key members of the Davos-based World Economic Forum, projects ideological ambiguity among its leadership and invites irredentist critics to continue to propagate notions of a hidden world government that appeal to American nativists and some on the European right.
If the solution to this globalist red herring known as "currency manipulation" actually succeeds at placing the renminbi in a currency spread basket with the euro, the yen, the real and possibly other currencies, it harkens back to the mother of all "currency manipulations" orchestrated by Washington, the ill-fated Plaza Accords of 1985 during the free-market "Reagan revolution" by then US secretary of state James Baker, with his close ties to globalist oil interests.
What followed was an epidemic of protectionist policy some thought would reduce the huge current account surpluses held by major US trading partners -- notably Japan and West Germany. Like China today, they were buying US government bonds and other instruments to help finance the burgeoning US trade deficit.
While America's great communicator was telling Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear that wall down" nations holding big US paper were propping the US economy up and American's who vote like Joe the Plumber were the last to know about it. The strategy helped bring the downfall of the "evil empire" and the Soviet command economy. But while Plaza helped enhance the euphoria surrounding the end of the Cold War it created problems for Washington's major trading partners and hurt the purchasing power of working American families long before Rich Trumka got on his virtual soapbox.
The resulting economic downturn provided opportunities for free-market globalists to reduce the size of programs associated with democracies built on the social contract model. And it damaged the structural integrity of the US economy, creating that giant sucking sound Ross Perot identified with US jobs being outsourced to low wage nations, setting the stage for peak oil, scandals like Enron and the lack of sound regulatory mechanisms that helped spark the current economic crisis.
Ever since Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai sat down with Henry Kissinger Beijing has placed more emphasis on growing its economy than on helping Washington contain Kremlin ambitions, one of the cards Kissinger dealt China during his breakthrough visit; the world will know the rest of them when his archives open five years after his death.
Just months after the 1971 meet-up Kissinger's boss on the line and block chart, US president Richard M. Nixon, announced an agreement to end the war in Vietnam, and shortly after that Iraq, Syria and Egypt ganged up on Israel in the Yom Kippur War that touched off a costly OPEC oil embargo.
As oil prices went up, jobs in the US moved from the unionized north to the Sun Belt, where most unions were viewed with disdain. After that many Sun Belt jobs moved south of the border courtesy of NAFTA. Globalists started importing inexpensive Chinese and Japanese goods to subsidize decades of decapitalization-investing outside the US, not in it- and outsourcing, effectively masking declining real wages and loss of purchasing power among working Americans.
US media assets have attempted to magnify the impact of the global crisis in China by characterizing Beijing's sale of $34.2 billion in US Treasury bonds last December as a sign of economic weakness. But according to US Treasury reports, that sale represented just 4.3 percent of China's total dollar bond holdings of about $754.5 billion. Over the past 12 months, meanwhile, China has maintained the economic wherewithal to invest $33 billion in projects to promote sustainable energy with president Lula's government in Brazil, and with the new government of Christian president Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria. Not quite the economy on the ropes that CNN's resident globalist Fareed Zakaria says it is.
But while Washington puts the negative public diplomacy spotlight on China, Japan, with a current portfolio of about $769 billion, is the largest long term holder of US Treasury bonds. Thanks to US trade imbalances linked to its globalist induced dependence on foreign goods China and Japan hold more than $1.52 trillion in US Treasury instruments. That's about ten times the total amount of gold (148 million ounces) believed to be held at the US gold depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky. If Stan McChrystal wants to make the cover of Rolling Stone as often as Generalissimo Chaing Kai-Shek was on the cover of Time, he ought to start talking about that.
Former Kissinger aide Dr. Fred Bergsten, who has advised the government of China, says that a 20% upward revaluation of the the renminbi is not unreasonable. But Bergsten's construct would drive investors away from banking on China's economy and create the most disastrous global currency swings since Treasury secretary John Connally unilaterally took the US off the gold standard in 1972 on behalf of Richard Nixon.
After decades of playing supermarket sweepstakes with cheap Chinese goods American globalists are engaging in Cold War style brinkmanship that could broaden the income gap between developed regions in China and non-Mandarin speaking rural districts, creating political instability and presenting new risks for the crisis facing US economy. Such an inconvenient and risky strategy playing out in a neighboring nation would not be welcomed by Russian president Vladimir Putin and others in the Kremlin nor those heavily invested in the oil business in the region.
In today's information economy the globalist media place nations in economic groups like the Asian Tigers and the BRIC's and the CIVETS and play them off against each other. China is on the verge of becoming tagged as one of America's public diplomacy scapegoats. Mexico and Japan, who have been there before, can give Beijing lots of advice on how to deal with that problem.
Eric Ehrmann
The Hunfington Post, June 23, 2010
During the Cold War diplomats called US-China relations peaceful coexistence. Now, as G-20 nations again gather to sort out the flotsam and jetsam of the Bretton Woods system and mediate globalist greed, that coexistence has shape shifted into economic warfare.
While US treasury secretary Tim Geithner and his minions were buzzing up Chinese "currency manipulation" and linking it to AFL-CIO leader Rich Trumka's too little too late fulminations about loss of American jobs, Beijing orchestrated a two percent swing in the renminbi-dollar rate that has justifiably dampened profit taking by speculators and replicates renminbi market spreads against the Euro, the Japanese yen and the Brazilian real.
For those whose attention spans reside in the Tweetstream this classic, big government quick-fix sets up a back to the future paradigm for a failed post World War II economic order that was created largely by agents of Soviet -- not Chinese -- communism operating inside the US government like Harry Dexter White and his communist sympathizer counterpart John Maynard Keynes who was a consultant to the Bank of England which was still privately operated at that time. Ironically China was living in the era of the "backyard blast furnace" when Bretton Woods was rolled out and it is no secret that Chairman Mao's organization received US funding to conduct anti-Japanese operations during World War II .
The fact that business-to-business solutions alone can't fix the current set of monetary problems linked to sovereign debt flies in the face of the Capitalism 4.0 paradigm being floated by key members of the Davos-based World Economic Forum, projects ideological ambiguity among its leadership and invites irredentist critics to continue to propagate notions of a hidden world government that appeal to American nativists and some on the European right.
If the solution to this globalist red herring known as "currency manipulation" actually succeeds at placing the renminbi in a currency spread basket with the euro, the yen, the real and possibly other currencies, it harkens back to the mother of all "currency manipulations" orchestrated by Washington, the ill-fated Plaza Accords of 1985 during the free-market "Reagan revolution" by then US secretary of state James Baker, with his close ties to globalist oil interests.
What followed was an epidemic of protectionist policy some thought would reduce the huge current account surpluses held by major US trading partners -- notably Japan and West Germany. Like China today, they were buying US government bonds and other instruments to help finance the burgeoning US trade deficit.
While America's great communicator was telling Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear that wall down" nations holding big US paper were propping the US economy up and American's who vote like Joe the Plumber were the last to know about it. The strategy helped bring the downfall of the "evil empire" and the Soviet command economy. But while Plaza helped enhance the euphoria surrounding the end of the Cold War it created problems for Washington's major trading partners and hurt the purchasing power of working American families long before Rich Trumka got on his virtual soapbox.
The resulting economic downturn provided opportunities for free-market globalists to reduce the size of programs associated with democracies built on the social contract model. And it damaged the structural integrity of the US economy, creating that giant sucking sound Ross Perot identified with US jobs being outsourced to low wage nations, setting the stage for peak oil, scandals like Enron and the lack of sound regulatory mechanisms that helped spark the current economic crisis.
Ever since Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai sat down with Henry Kissinger Beijing has placed more emphasis on growing its economy than on helping Washington contain Kremlin ambitions, one of the cards Kissinger dealt China during his breakthrough visit; the world will know the rest of them when his archives open five years after his death.
Just months after the 1971 meet-up Kissinger's boss on the line and block chart, US president Richard M. Nixon, announced an agreement to end the war in Vietnam, and shortly after that Iraq, Syria and Egypt ganged up on Israel in the Yom Kippur War that touched off a costly OPEC oil embargo.
As oil prices went up, jobs in the US moved from the unionized north to the Sun Belt, where most unions were viewed with disdain. After that many Sun Belt jobs moved south of the border courtesy of NAFTA. Globalists started importing inexpensive Chinese and Japanese goods to subsidize decades of decapitalization-investing outside the US, not in it- and outsourcing, effectively masking declining real wages and loss of purchasing power among working Americans.
US media assets have attempted to magnify the impact of the global crisis in China by characterizing Beijing's sale of $34.2 billion in US Treasury bonds last December as a sign of economic weakness. But according to US Treasury reports, that sale represented just 4.3 percent of China's total dollar bond holdings of about $754.5 billion. Over the past 12 months, meanwhile, China has maintained the economic wherewithal to invest $33 billion in projects to promote sustainable energy with president Lula's government in Brazil, and with the new government of Christian president Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria. Not quite the economy on the ropes that CNN's resident globalist Fareed Zakaria says it is.
But while Washington puts the negative public diplomacy spotlight on China, Japan, with a current portfolio of about $769 billion, is the largest long term holder of US Treasury bonds. Thanks to US trade imbalances linked to its globalist induced dependence on foreign goods China and Japan hold more than $1.52 trillion in US Treasury instruments. That's about ten times the total amount of gold (148 million ounces) believed to be held at the US gold depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky. If Stan McChrystal wants to make the cover of Rolling Stone as often as Generalissimo Chaing Kai-Shek was on the cover of Time, he ought to start talking about that.
Former Kissinger aide Dr. Fred Bergsten, who has advised the government of China, says that a 20% upward revaluation of the the renminbi is not unreasonable. But Bergsten's construct would drive investors away from banking on China's economy and create the most disastrous global currency swings since Treasury secretary John Connally unilaterally took the US off the gold standard in 1972 on behalf of Richard Nixon.
After decades of playing supermarket sweepstakes with cheap Chinese goods American globalists are engaging in Cold War style brinkmanship that could broaden the income gap between developed regions in China and non-Mandarin speaking rural districts, creating political instability and presenting new risks for the crisis facing US economy. Such an inconvenient and risky strategy playing out in a neighboring nation would not be welcomed by Russian president Vladimir Putin and others in the Kremlin nor those heavily invested in the oil business in the region.
In today's information economy the globalist media place nations in economic groups like the Asian Tigers and the BRIC's and the CIVETS and play them off against each other. China is on the verge of becoming tagged as one of America's public diplomacy scapegoats. Mexico and Japan, who have been there before, can give Beijing lots of advice on how to deal with that problem.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Strike at Honda plant in China
Strike in China Highlights Gap in Workers’ Pay
By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA
The New York Times, May 28, 2010
FOSHAN, China — After years of being pushed to work 12-hour days, six days a week on monotonous low-wage assembly line tasks, China’s workers are starting to push back.
A strike at an enormous Honda transmission factory here in southeastern China has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a symbol of this nation’s struggle with income inequality, rising inflation and soaring property prices that have put home ownership beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.
And perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities let the strike happen — up to a point.
In the kind of scene that more often plays out at strikes in America than at labor actions in China, print and television reporters from state-controlled media across the country have started covering the walkout here, even waiting outside the nearly deserted front gate on Thursday and Friday in hope of any news. All the Chinese reporters disappeared on Saturday morning, however, as the government, apparently nervous, suddenly imposed without explanation a blanket ban on domestic media coverage of the strike.
A worker at a factory dormitory said on Saturday afternoon that the strike continued, and police were nowhere in sight at the factory or the dormitory. The authorities have been leery of letting the media report on labor disputes, fearing that it could encourage workers elsewhere to rebel. The new permissiveness, however temporary, coincides with growing sentiment among some officials and economists that Chinese workers deserve higher wages for their role in the country’s global export machine.
And without higher incomes, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be unable to play their part in the domestic consumer spending boom on which this nation hopes to base its next round of economic growth.
“This is all because there is a major political debate going on about how to deal with the nation’s growing income gap, and the need to do something about wages,” said Andreas Lauffs, a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie who specializes in Chinese labor issues.
If wages do rise, that could bring higher prices for Western consumers for goods as diverse as toys at Wal-Mart and iPads from Apple.
The Chinese media may also have found it a little easier, politically, to cover this strike because Honda is a Japanese company, and anti-Japanese sentiment still simmers in China as a legacy of World War II. Certainly, the strike is hitting Honda hard, as the resulting shortage of transmissions and other engine parts has forced the company to halt production at all four of its assembly plants in China.
Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda’s prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them.
A Honda spokeswoman declined to discuss specific issues in the strike negotiations.
The intense media coverage may evoke historical memories of the 1980 shipyard strike in Gdansk, Poland, that gave rise to the Solidarity movement and paved the way for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But the reality here is much different.
Instead of tens of thousands of grizzled and angry shipyard workers, the Honda strike involves about 1,900 mostly cheerful young people. And the employees interviewed say their goal is more money, not a larger political agenda.
“If they give us 800 renminbi a month, we’ll go back to work right away,” said one young man, describing a pay increase that would add about $117 a month to an average pay that is now around $150 monthly. He said he had read on the Internet of considerably higher wages at other factories in China and expected Honda to match them with an immediate pay increase.
Many workers at other factories in southeastern China already earn $300 a month, but they do so only through considerable overtime. And even that higher income is not enough to embark on the middle-class dream in China of owning a small apartment and subcompact car. Officially, though, the government is discouraging heavy reliance on overtime, and workers here said that Honda was not assigning much.
The strikers said that Honda mainly hired recent graduates of high schools or vocational schools. And so, most are in their late teens or early 20s, representing a new generation of employees, many of whom had not been born when the Chinese authorities suppressed protests by students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — a watershed event whose 21st anniversary falls next Friday.
The profile of striking workers seems to run more along the lines of slightly bookish would-be engineers — perhaps without the grades or money to attend college — rather than political activists. Besides their low wages, the workers seem focused on issues like the factory’s air-conditioning not being cool enough, and the unfairness of having to rise from their dormitories as early as 5:30 for a 7 a.m. shift.
Workers said that in addition to their pay, they also received free lodging in rooms that slept four to six in bunk beds. They also get free lunches, subsidized breakfasts for the equivalent of 30 cents and dinners for about $1.50.
The striking employees said that some senior workers, known as team leaders, had allied themselves with management. But they insisted that the rank-and-file workers were solidly in favor of walkout — a claim impossible to verify.
Although China is run by the Communist Party and has state-controlled unions, the unions are largely charged with overseeing workers, not bargaining for higher wages or pressing for improved labor conditions. And they are not allowed to strike, although China’s laws do not have explicit prohibitions against doing so.
Workers at the Honda factory dormitory said that the official union at the factory was not representing them but was serving as an intermediary between them and management. Li Jianming, the national spokesman for the All China Federation of Trade Unions, declined to comment.
The workers here have been on strike since May 21, with no resolution in sight. But the strike did not come to broader notice until Thursday and Friday as Japanese media began reporting the shutdown of Honda assembly plants, and as Chinese media and Internet sites were allowed to report extensively on those activities.
The unusually permissive approach of the authorities toward media coverage of the strike follows a decision to tolerate extensive coverage this month of suicides by workers at the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn factory complex in nearby Shenzhen that supplies Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
The official China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages might be fueling tensions between workers and employers. The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of what the newspaper described as opposition from employers.
Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said the strike was a significant development in China’s labor relations history and that “such a large-scale, organized strike will force China’s labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy.”
Keith Bradsher reported from Foshan, China, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei contributed research.
By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA
The New York Times, May 28, 2010
FOSHAN, China — After years of being pushed to work 12-hour days, six days a week on monotonous low-wage assembly line tasks, China’s workers are starting to push back.
A strike at an enormous Honda transmission factory here in southeastern China has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a symbol of this nation’s struggle with income inequality, rising inflation and soaring property prices that have put home ownership beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.
And perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities let the strike happen — up to a point.
In the kind of scene that more often plays out at strikes in America than at labor actions in China, print and television reporters from state-controlled media across the country have started covering the walkout here, even waiting outside the nearly deserted front gate on Thursday and Friday in hope of any news. All the Chinese reporters disappeared on Saturday morning, however, as the government, apparently nervous, suddenly imposed without explanation a blanket ban on domestic media coverage of the strike.
A worker at a factory dormitory said on Saturday afternoon that the strike continued, and police were nowhere in sight at the factory or the dormitory. The authorities have been leery of letting the media report on labor disputes, fearing that it could encourage workers elsewhere to rebel. The new permissiveness, however temporary, coincides with growing sentiment among some officials and economists that Chinese workers deserve higher wages for their role in the country’s global export machine.
And without higher incomes, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be unable to play their part in the domestic consumer spending boom on which this nation hopes to base its next round of economic growth.
“This is all because there is a major political debate going on about how to deal with the nation’s growing income gap, and the need to do something about wages,” said Andreas Lauffs, a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie who specializes in Chinese labor issues.
If wages do rise, that could bring higher prices for Western consumers for goods as diverse as toys at Wal-Mart and iPads from Apple.
The Chinese media may also have found it a little easier, politically, to cover this strike because Honda is a Japanese company, and anti-Japanese sentiment still simmers in China as a legacy of World War II. Certainly, the strike is hitting Honda hard, as the resulting shortage of transmissions and other engine parts has forced the company to halt production at all four of its assembly plants in China.
Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda’s prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them.
A Honda spokeswoman declined to discuss specific issues in the strike negotiations.
The intense media coverage may evoke historical memories of the 1980 shipyard strike in Gdansk, Poland, that gave rise to the Solidarity movement and paved the way for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But the reality here is much different.
Instead of tens of thousands of grizzled and angry shipyard workers, the Honda strike involves about 1,900 mostly cheerful young people. And the employees interviewed say their goal is more money, not a larger political agenda.
“If they give us 800 renminbi a month, we’ll go back to work right away,” said one young man, describing a pay increase that would add about $117 a month to an average pay that is now around $150 monthly. He said he had read on the Internet of considerably higher wages at other factories in China and expected Honda to match them with an immediate pay increase.
Many workers at other factories in southeastern China already earn $300 a month, but they do so only through considerable overtime. And even that higher income is not enough to embark on the middle-class dream in China of owning a small apartment and subcompact car. Officially, though, the government is discouraging heavy reliance on overtime, and workers here said that Honda was not assigning much.
The strikers said that Honda mainly hired recent graduates of high schools or vocational schools. And so, most are in their late teens or early 20s, representing a new generation of employees, many of whom had not been born when the Chinese authorities suppressed protests by students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — a watershed event whose 21st anniversary falls next Friday.
The profile of striking workers seems to run more along the lines of slightly bookish would-be engineers — perhaps without the grades or money to attend college — rather than political activists. Besides their low wages, the workers seem focused on issues like the factory’s air-conditioning not being cool enough, and the unfairness of having to rise from their dormitories as early as 5:30 for a 7 a.m. shift.
Workers said that in addition to their pay, they also received free lodging in rooms that slept four to six in bunk beds. They also get free lunches, subsidized breakfasts for the equivalent of 30 cents and dinners for about $1.50.
The striking employees said that some senior workers, known as team leaders, had allied themselves with management. But they insisted that the rank-and-file workers were solidly in favor of walkout — a claim impossible to verify.
Although China is run by the Communist Party and has state-controlled unions, the unions are largely charged with overseeing workers, not bargaining for higher wages or pressing for improved labor conditions. And they are not allowed to strike, although China’s laws do not have explicit prohibitions against doing so.
Workers at the Honda factory dormitory said that the official union at the factory was not representing them but was serving as an intermediary between them and management. Li Jianming, the national spokesman for the All China Federation of Trade Unions, declined to comment.
The workers here have been on strike since May 21, with no resolution in sight. But the strike did not come to broader notice until Thursday and Friday as Japanese media began reporting the shutdown of Honda assembly plants, and as Chinese media and Internet sites were allowed to report extensively on those activities.
The unusually permissive approach of the authorities toward media coverage of the strike follows a decision to tolerate extensive coverage this month of suicides by workers at the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn factory complex in nearby Shenzhen that supplies Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
The official China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages might be fueling tensions between workers and employers. The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of what the newspaper described as opposition from employers.
Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said the strike was a significant development in China’s labor relations history and that “such a large-scale, organized strike will force China’s labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy.”
Keith Bradsher reported from Foshan, China, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei contributed research.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Japan's Germ Warfare in China, during IIWW
When Germ Warfare Happened
Judith Miller
The City Journal, Vol. 20, n. 2, Spring 2010
Seventy years ago, Japan’s bio-attacks killed hundreds of thousands. The effects linger today.
Jiang Chun Geng, a survivor of Japan's war on China
Jiang Chun Geng’s poisoned right leg, with its suppurating wounds, hangs limply over the gray wooden bench in the medical clinic here in Dachen, a village in China’s province of Zhejiang. Twice the size of his left leg, the limb is too tender to touch during my visit. Instead, Dr. Zhu Jian Jun gently dabs the putrid wounds with an alcohol-drenched swab. Jiang’s heavily lined face tightens as Zhu wraps the fiery stump with a white bandage and unhooks an intravenous antibiotic drip. Another treatment is over.
Jiang, a 70-year-old farmer, can’t remember a time when flesh-eating ulcers didn’t cover his legs. “They never go away,” he tells me. “They just get drier. Sometimes they hurt less.” He doesn’t know for sure how he got them, but his father told him that the wounds first appeared in July 1942, soon after the Japanese army passed through his village. His entire family developed the festering sores. His mother and younger brother died in unbearable pain a decade later as the untreated, mysterious infection crept up their legs.
Jiang is one of 15 elderly Chinese men and women whom Zhu is treating in his simple village clinic for what locals label “rotten leg disease.” A definitive diagnosis is no longer possible so many decades after the initial exposure and secondary infections. But Chinese, American, and other Western physicians who have examined the survivors, documented their histories, and photographed their wounds claim that they are victims of the most gruesome biological warfare attacks in modern history.
These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact, for many years, Japan’s use of biological weapons in China was largely forgotten. Only recently has a resurgent China begun to remind Japan—and the world—of the atrocities.
In America, the historical amnesia has a Cold War source, argues Jeanne Guillemin, a political analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After World War II ended, the United States and the Soviet Union sought information about Japanese germ experimentation for their own covert bioweapons efforts. In 1947, American officials secretly agreed to grant immunity from war-crimes prosecution to the head of Japan’s program, Major General Shiro Ishii, and to 18 other biowarfare scientists in exchange for intelligence. As Harris recounted, Japanese pathologists gave U.S. officials some 8,000 slides of human tissues and blood samples taken from autopsied victims, as well as knowledge about the warheads and bombs that Japan had designed to spread its killer germs.
While several American military historians and scientists have downplayed the value of the Japanese data, a U.S. military document unearthed by Guillemin called the information “of the highest intelligence value,” though before it underwent full analysis. The Japanese program had to remain secret, another military document concluded (in diplomatic understatement), “to protect the interests of the United States and to guard against embarrassment.” Only after America and the Soviet Union (the Soviets only putatively) ended their offensive germ-weapons programs in the late 1960s and signed a treaty banning pathogens as offensive weapons in 1972 did significant amounts of evidence about the arrangement become public.
A second foreign-policy consideration also helps explain America’s deal and ensuing silence, Guillemin points out. American officials believed that prosecuting Japanese scientists for war crimes that the widely revered emperor himself might have authorized would jeopardize Washington’s effort to rebuild Japan as a stable democracy, “crucial to offsetting the Soviet presence in Asia and the rise of Communist China,” she writes. Indeed, General Douglas MacArthur personally intervened to protect Japanese scientists who had worked on the program from prosecution.
Though President Clinton ordered U.S. government agencies in 2000 to make more than 100,000 pages of official documents on the program available to scholars, key questions remain—for instance, which American official authorized the arrangement with the Japanese biowarriors. The answers are unlikely to be found in Japan, whose own archives on the initiative remain largely closed to public scrutiny.
As for China itself, historically it has vacillated between stoking anti-Japanese nationalism and trying to dampen it, depending on its political needs. For instance, China once estimated that 10 million of its citizens died during Japan’s traumatizing occupation of eastern China and Manchuria—the “Anti-Japanese War of 1931 Through 1945,” as China calls it. Then, after the Tiananmen Square crisis, China raised the estimate to 35 million, seeking to divert attention from domestic discontent. But it’s surely the case, observes Susan L. Shirk, a former State Department official and the author of China, Fragile Superpower, that almost every Chinese family suffered under the onslaught.
Only now that China has emerged as Asia’s leading power has it begun to highlight Japan’s biological crimes against it. The focal point of this effort is the Unit 731 Museum, just south of the city of Harbin in Manchuria. Built on the ruins of a cluster of ten villages known as Ping Fan, the museum occupies what was once the headquarters of Japan’s germ empire. Constructed by Chinese slave laborers in 1936, Unit 731, whose Orwellian cover name was the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit,” was a vast laboratory complex of 3.7 square miles with more than 70 buildings—laboratories, officers’ housing, a Buddhist temple, an airfield and railway station, three crematoria to dispose of experimentation victims, a prison, a power plant, and even a brothel to service the 3,000 Japanese scientists and guards who lived and worked there during its peak. Behind the complex’s high, heavily guarded walls, Major General Ishii’s scientists experimented on Chinese, Americans, Koreans, Mongolians, Russians, and others with some of the world’s deadliest germs.
The museum’s main exhibition hall, located in Unit 731’s administration building, describes Ishii’s program and takes visitors through the procedures that his medical team followed in processing doomed inmates. Maruta, or “logs,” as the Japanese scientists dubbed their victims, would be registered, given numbers, and later dragged from their cells through underground tunnels into the testing labs at the compound’s center. Here, Sheldon Harris reported, they would have to eat food laced with one of 31 germs—anthrax-filled chocolate, plague-treated cookies, typhus-infected beer—or be injected directly with deadly pathogens to determine the minimal dose required to sicken or kill them. The “logs” usually lasted only a few weeks. Some were “sacrificed” after unit officials deemed them no longer fit for scientific study. Only a few survived for as long as six months, Unit 731 documents show.
Room Six of the museum contains a display of the high- and low-altitude bombs that the Japanese developed to disseminate their lethal cargo. One bomb included a porcelain cylinder to prevent germs from destruction on impact. Another was called “Mother and Daughters”—the Mother part of the weapon coming with a radio device that would detonate a cluster of germ-loaded Daughter bombs. That weapon proved too expensive for mass production, Harris observed. But other types of anthrax-, plague-, and bacteria-filled bombs were tested on hundreds of prisoners, who were tied to stakes in the ground and died in agony.
Room Nine displays fragmentary evidence of Japan’s “fascistic guilt which cannot be denied,” as the museum puts it: a wooden saw for dismembering human remains and racks for hanging entrails fresh from autopsies, some performed while the victims remained alive to ensure that death didn’t alter the disease’s impact on the organ or bones under study. I recalled interviewing an elderly Japanese soldier several years earlier who told me that he had performed vivisections, without anesthetic, on naked prisoners. Describing in almost a whisper his revulsion the first time he picked up his scalpel when ordered to do so, he said that he eventually grew accustomed to the “procedure.” But his anguish suggested otherwise.
The museum’s holdings are necessarily limited. When the Japanese had to flee Ping Fan in 1945, they attempted to destroy all traces of their crimes against humanity—as the Nuremberg tribunal called similar experiments performed by Nazi doctors in Europe—by killing the last 400 prisoners, setting infected animals free, and blowing up the complex.
Dr. Jin Cheng Ming, the museum’s director, is cautious about death-toll estimates. The museum has been able to identify only 277 of the thousands of prisoners who came here, he said, mostly from the records kept by the Japanese transportation units that delivered them. But his estimates, which draw on provincial records and archives, are comparable with Harris’s. In his Chinese-language book on the program, published in 2008, Jin concluded that so much of the widely dispersed program was secret that the death toll might remain uncertain even if Japan cooperated. “Maybe the Japanese know exact numbers,” he says. “Or maybe your government does, since Japan shared so many records with you.” In 2006, he adds, the U.S. gave China access to about 2,000 more pages of declassified records, but most were from late in the program. He and his staff have made 17 trips to Japan to collect oral evidence from former members of Unit 731. “It’s hard because Japan is not sympathetic,” he says. But part of the museum’s mission is to videotape such testimonies for its collection, which now features over 200 hours of them.
After opening in 1985 with a one-room exhibit and a staff of three, the museum languished for years. Few foreigners or even Chinese came here. Today, though, it bustles with activity and is undergoing a vast expansion. Thirty-one sites are being excavated or renovated in and around the museum, which received more than 6 million visitors last year, about half of them Chinese schoolchildren. The Chinese government has tripled the museum’s budget, and its staff has grown to 40.
The feverish activity is part of Jin’s campaign to have the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization designate his museum a cultural-heritage monument—joining another infamous death complex, Poland’s Auschwitz. UNESCO sent a team to the museum late last summer to examine the site, and Jin is optimistic that the organization will eventually add his museum to its list. “While we still have many questions, we have so much more evidence than we had before,” he tells me. “People must know and face their history. And the Japanese government should be responsible for its actions.”
As horrifying as the experiments performed at Unit 731’s headquarters were, they pale beside the horrors that Japan inflicted on the Chinese population at large. As we travel by bullet train from Shanghai deep into the province of Zhejiang, activist Wang Xuan tells me that the worst attacks occurred between 1940 and 1943, when the Japanese military struck dozens of Chinese cities and towns with pathogens that triggered recurring plague epidemics and killed hundreds of thousands.
The methods were brutal. Army trucks dumped gallons of deadly germs alongside roads and railway lines linking Chinese towns so that infections would spread from town to town; planes dropped porcelain bombs containing infected fleas on dozens of villages, causing devastating outbreaks of bubonic plague. The Japanese laced more than 1,000 wells in the area of Harbin with typhoid bacilli. They also inserted typhus into bottles of lemonade that children loved to drink in the summer, Harris reported. In Nanking, they distributed anthrax-filled chocolate and cake to hungry children. The Japanese discovered that packing fountain pens and walking sticks with deadly germs was a particularly effective way of secretly disseminating them. In 1940, Major General Ishii sent a train carrying 70 kilograms of typhus bacterium, 50 kilograms of cholera germs, and 5 kilograms of plague-infected fleas to the city of Hangzhou, a holiday resort favored by Shanghai’s wealthy. From there, the germs were dumped into ponds and reservoirs and spread by aerial spraying, contaminating all life in fields of wheat and millet during the harvest.
As our train pulls into the station, Wang Xuan tells me that near here, over the small town of Quzhou, a Japanese plane dropped plague-infected fleas in October 1940. The first victims died a few days later. By 1948, more than 5,000 people had perished. Prior to that outbreak, no case of plague had ever been reported in the town, says Dr. Qiu Ming Xuan, former chief of the Quzhou Center for Disease Control.
That fact proved important in 1997, Wang explains, when she helped organize a lawsuit against Japan for spreading bubonic plague and other fatal diseases across China. Still, the town’s plague-free earlier history—as well as oral histories from elderly residents of Chongshan, a town near Quzhou, and epidemiological data from local and provincial files—might not have been sufficient to persuade the court to side with the Chinese plaintiffs, since biological samples from the 1940 attack were no longer available. But Chongshan’s survivors submitted to the court an original document: the working diary of a senior Japanese military officer, then stationed in Nanjing, responsible for contacts between his forces and Unit 731. The diary mentioned a plague attack on Quzhou on October 4, 1940—a date that coincided perfectly with the plague’s spread from Quzhou to Chongshan.
In 2002, the Japanese court finally ruled that Japan had indeed used biological weapons against China—the first such official acknowledgment. But the court also ruled that the Chinese were not entitled to compensation under international law. Nor did Tokyo itself acknowledge having used germ weapons during the war or apologize to the Chinese victims. Since then, a succession of Japanese governments has remained silent about the crimes.
Sufferers from “rotten leg disease” have no comparable diary entry or official Japanese source that could prove to a court that their suffering was related to Japan’s germ-weapons attacks. Indeed, even some Japanese researchers sympathetic to China challenge the claim that Japan’s biowarfare caused the disease. Keiichi Tsuneishi, a distinguished Japanese historian who helped uncover Japan’s atrocities in China, says that a bacterium native to the region could have been responsible, and he estimates that pathogens killed no more than 1,000 Chinese in the province of Zhejiang.
Wang Xuan responds that Tsuneishi is neither a biologist nor a physician and that he has never visited the affected regions. Refusing to yield to such challengers, she recruited four university students last summer to interview “rotten leg” survivors of the 1942 outbreak and to locate more victims. According to both Qiu and the students, in the villages surrounding the small city of Jinhua in central Zhejiang, 5 percent of the residents born before 1942 described having developed raw, festering wounds on their legs similar to those of the patients I saw.
In Blood-Weeping Accusations, a book in Chinese and English published by the Chinese Communist Party in 2005, some Chinese researchers conclude that anthrax caused the wounds. But at least two American physicians—Martin Furmanski, a pathologist and physician who wrote an essay in the book, and Michael Franzblau, a retired professor of dermatology at the University of California—believe that the culprit is Burkholderia mallei, or glanders. A horrendous skin disease that usually strikes horses, donkeys, and mules, glanders in humans is “exquisitely painful,” Furmanski says. Left untreated, it causes deep wounds that will not heal unless treated with antibiotics. “Pustules come up from below, point, break, and ooze a pussy fluid,” Furmanski explains. “Untreated, they can stay for months or even years. Only rarely do they heal. And when they occasionally do, you get a terrible scar.” Cutaneous anthrax, by contrast, starts as a lesion on the skin that blackens and swells. “You look like the Michelin man,” he says—but when it heals, it doesn’t leave a scar.
Furmanski became convinced that glanders, not anthrax, was the cause of “rotten leg disease” after he and Franzblau toured Quzhou with Wang Xuan in 2002. While taking a sample from a wound 60 years after the initial exposure probably would not reveal the identity of the original infectious agent, it might shed light on the nature of the infection or how best to treat it, he notes. But Furmanski says that he didn’t try to culture a sample and take it back to America because he hadn’t requested China’s permission. Moreover, the shipment of glanders is restricted in America, given its potential use as a biological weapon, he adds. Indeed, glanders remains a research subject at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, the military’s premier biodefense lab, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. “Legally, I couldn’t bring it back into the United States,” Furmanski says.
Working closely with Wang, Franzblau has tried for years to introduce a resolution at World Medical Association meetings calling upon doctors to ask Japan to “officially repudiate Unit 731” and to explain “why physicians employed in Unit 731 have never been prosecuted for murder and crimes against humanity.” Each year, his resolution has gone nowhere. “There has never even been a debate,” he complains. The Japanese Medical Association has also remained silent, perhaps because one former president of the JMA was a Unit 731 staff member, as were former officials in many prestigious Japanese organizations.
Wang has raised tens of thousands of dollars to provide survivors the medical care they so desperately need. The Chinese government has done little to care for them, she says. Nor has any money come from Japanese organizations or individuals, unsurprisingly. And she has another fear: “I am worried that when these people die, the memory of what Japan did in China will die with them.”
According to Jan van Aken, a German writer, activist, and now Bundestag member who accompanied Wang on a tour of the region in 2006, “almost the entire microbiology elite of wartime Japan may have been involved in one way or the other in the heinous crimes of Unit 731.” In postwar Germany, by contrast, doctors who participated in similar experiments were exposed and convicted of crimes against humanity. “The time has come for Japan to appoint an independent, international commission, to investigate and publicly document, without restraints, the involvement of former members of their profession,” says van Aken. “This was the most intensive use of biological weapons in modern history. Yet Japan remains silent. And so do most of us.”
Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a FOX News contributor.
Judith Miller
The City Journal, Vol. 20, n. 2, Spring 2010
Seventy years ago, Japan’s bio-attacks killed hundreds of thousands. The effects linger today.
Jiang Chun Geng, a survivor of Japan's war on China
Jiang Chun Geng’s poisoned right leg, with its suppurating wounds, hangs limply over the gray wooden bench in the medical clinic here in Dachen, a village in China’s province of Zhejiang. Twice the size of his left leg, the limb is too tender to touch during my visit. Instead, Dr. Zhu Jian Jun gently dabs the putrid wounds with an alcohol-drenched swab. Jiang’s heavily lined face tightens as Zhu wraps the fiery stump with a white bandage and unhooks an intravenous antibiotic drip. Another treatment is over.
Jiang, a 70-year-old farmer, can’t remember a time when flesh-eating ulcers didn’t cover his legs. “They never go away,” he tells me. “They just get drier. Sometimes they hurt less.” He doesn’t know for sure how he got them, but his father told him that the wounds first appeared in July 1942, soon after the Japanese army passed through his village. His entire family developed the festering sores. His mother and younger brother died in unbearable pain a decade later as the untreated, mysterious infection crept up their legs.
Jiang is one of 15 elderly Chinese men and women whom Zhu is treating in his simple village clinic for what locals label “rotten leg disease.” A definitive diagnosis is no longer possible so many decades after the initial exposure and secondary infections. But Chinese, American, and other Western physicians who have examined the survivors, documented their histories, and photographed their wounds claim that they are victims of the most gruesome biological warfare attacks in modern history.
These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact, for many years, Japan’s use of biological weapons in China was largely forgotten. Only recently has a resurgent China begun to remind Japan—and the world—of the atrocities.
In America, the historical amnesia has a Cold War source, argues Jeanne Guillemin, a political analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After World War II ended, the United States and the Soviet Union sought information about Japanese germ experimentation for their own covert bioweapons efforts. In 1947, American officials secretly agreed to grant immunity from war-crimes prosecution to the head of Japan’s program, Major General Shiro Ishii, and to 18 other biowarfare scientists in exchange for intelligence. As Harris recounted, Japanese pathologists gave U.S. officials some 8,000 slides of human tissues and blood samples taken from autopsied victims, as well as knowledge about the warheads and bombs that Japan had designed to spread its killer germs.
While several American military historians and scientists have downplayed the value of the Japanese data, a U.S. military document unearthed by Guillemin called the information “of the highest intelligence value,” though before it underwent full analysis. The Japanese program had to remain secret, another military document concluded (in diplomatic understatement), “to protect the interests of the United States and to guard against embarrassment.” Only after America and the Soviet Union (the Soviets only putatively) ended their offensive germ-weapons programs in the late 1960s and signed a treaty banning pathogens as offensive weapons in 1972 did significant amounts of evidence about the arrangement become public.
A second foreign-policy consideration also helps explain America’s deal and ensuing silence, Guillemin points out. American officials believed that prosecuting Japanese scientists for war crimes that the widely revered emperor himself might have authorized would jeopardize Washington’s effort to rebuild Japan as a stable democracy, “crucial to offsetting the Soviet presence in Asia and the rise of Communist China,” she writes. Indeed, General Douglas MacArthur personally intervened to protect Japanese scientists who had worked on the program from prosecution.
Though President Clinton ordered U.S. government agencies in 2000 to make more than 100,000 pages of official documents on the program available to scholars, key questions remain—for instance, which American official authorized the arrangement with the Japanese biowarriors. The answers are unlikely to be found in Japan, whose own archives on the initiative remain largely closed to public scrutiny.
As for China itself, historically it has vacillated between stoking anti-Japanese nationalism and trying to dampen it, depending on its political needs. For instance, China once estimated that 10 million of its citizens died during Japan’s traumatizing occupation of eastern China and Manchuria—the “Anti-Japanese War of 1931 Through 1945,” as China calls it. Then, after the Tiananmen Square crisis, China raised the estimate to 35 million, seeking to divert attention from domestic discontent. But it’s surely the case, observes Susan L. Shirk, a former State Department official and the author of China, Fragile Superpower, that almost every Chinese family suffered under the onslaught.
Only now that China has emerged as Asia’s leading power has it begun to highlight Japan’s biological crimes against it. The focal point of this effort is the Unit 731 Museum, just south of the city of Harbin in Manchuria. Built on the ruins of a cluster of ten villages known as Ping Fan, the museum occupies what was once the headquarters of Japan’s germ empire. Constructed by Chinese slave laborers in 1936, Unit 731, whose Orwellian cover name was the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit,” was a vast laboratory complex of 3.7 square miles with more than 70 buildings—laboratories, officers’ housing, a Buddhist temple, an airfield and railway station, three crematoria to dispose of experimentation victims, a prison, a power plant, and even a brothel to service the 3,000 Japanese scientists and guards who lived and worked there during its peak. Behind the complex’s high, heavily guarded walls, Major General Ishii’s scientists experimented on Chinese, Americans, Koreans, Mongolians, Russians, and others with some of the world’s deadliest germs.
The museum’s main exhibition hall, located in Unit 731’s administration building, describes Ishii’s program and takes visitors through the procedures that his medical team followed in processing doomed inmates. Maruta, or “logs,” as the Japanese scientists dubbed their victims, would be registered, given numbers, and later dragged from their cells through underground tunnels into the testing labs at the compound’s center. Here, Sheldon Harris reported, they would have to eat food laced with one of 31 germs—anthrax-filled chocolate, plague-treated cookies, typhus-infected beer—or be injected directly with deadly pathogens to determine the minimal dose required to sicken or kill them. The “logs” usually lasted only a few weeks. Some were “sacrificed” after unit officials deemed them no longer fit for scientific study. Only a few survived for as long as six months, Unit 731 documents show.
Room Six of the museum contains a display of the high- and low-altitude bombs that the Japanese developed to disseminate their lethal cargo. One bomb included a porcelain cylinder to prevent germs from destruction on impact. Another was called “Mother and Daughters”—the Mother part of the weapon coming with a radio device that would detonate a cluster of germ-loaded Daughter bombs. That weapon proved too expensive for mass production, Harris observed. But other types of anthrax-, plague-, and bacteria-filled bombs were tested on hundreds of prisoners, who were tied to stakes in the ground and died in agony.
Room Nine displays fragmentary evidence of Japan’s “fascistic guilt which cannot be denied,” as the museum puts it: a wooden saw for dismembering human remains and racks for hanging entrails fresh from autopsies, some performed while the victims remained alive to ensure that death didn’t alter the disease’s impact on the organ or bones under study. I recalled interviewing an elderly Japanese soldier several years earlier who told me that he had performed vivisections, without anesthetic, on naked prisoners. Describing in almost a whisper his revulsion the first time he picked up his scalpel when ordered to do so, he said that he eventually grew accustomed to the “procedure.” But his anguish suggested otherwise.
The museum’s holdings are necessarily limited. When the Japanese had to flee Ping Fan in 1945, they attempted to destroy all traces of their crimes against humanity—as the Nuremberg tribunal called similar experiments performed by Nazi doctors in Europe—by killing the last 400 prisoners, setting infected animals free, and blowing up the complex.
Dr. Jin Cheng Ming, the museum’s director, is cautious about death-toll estimates. The museum has been able to identify only 277 of the thousands of prisoners who came here, he said, mostly from the records kept by the Japanese transportation units that delivered them. But his estimates, which draw on provincial records and archives, are comparable with Harris’s. In his Chinese-language book on the program, published in 2008, Jin concluded that so much of the widely dispersed program was secret that the death toll might remain uncertain even if Japan cooperated. “Maybe the Japanese know exact numbers,” he says. “Or maybe your government does, since Japan shared so many records with you.” In 2006, he adds, the U.S. gave China access to about 2,000 more pages of declassified records, but most were from late in the program. He and his staff have made 17 trips to Japan to collect oral evidence from former members of Unit 731. “It’s hard because Japan is not sympathetic,” he says. But part of the museum’s mission is to videotape such testimonies for its collection, which now features over 200 hours of them.
After opening in 1985 with a one-room exhibit and a staff of three, the museum languished for years. Few foreigners or even Chinese came here. Today, though, it bustles with activity and is undergoing a vast expansion. Thirty-one sites are being excavated or renovated in and around the museum, which received more than 6 million visitors last year, about half of them Chinese schoolchildren. The Chinese government has tripled the museum’s budget, and its staff has grown to 40.
The feverish activity is part of Jin’s campaign to have the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization designate his museum a cultural-heritage monument—joining another infamous death complex, Poland’s Auschwitz. UNESCO sent a team to the museum late last summer to examine the site, and Jin is optimistic that the organization will eventually add his museum to its list. “While we still have many questions, we have so much more evidence than we had before,” he tells me. “People must know and face their history. And the Japanese government should be responsible for its actions.”
As horrifying as the experiments performed at Unit 731’s headquarters were, they pale beside the horrors that Japan inflicted on the Chinese population at large. As we travel by bullet train from Shanghai deep into the province of Zhejiang, activist Wang Xuan tells me that the worst attacks occurred between 1940 and 1943, when the Japanese military struck dozens of Chinese cities and towns with pathogens that triggered recurring plague epidemics and killed hundreds of thousands.
The methods were brutal. Army trucks dumped gallons of deadly germs alongside roads and railway lines linking Chinese towns so that infections would spread from town to town; planes dropped porcelain bombs containing infected fleas on dozens of villages, causing devastating outbreaks of bubonic plague. The Japanese laced more than 1,000 wells in the area of Harbin with typhoid bacilli. They also inserted typhus into bottles of lemonade that children loved to drink in the summer, Harris reported. In Nanking, they distributed anthrax-filled chocolate and cake to hungry children. The Japanese discovered that packing fountain pens and walking sticks with deadly germs was a particularly effective way of secretly disseminating them. In 1940, Major General Ishii sent a train carrying 70 kilograms of typhus bacterium, 50 kilograms of cholera germs, and 5 kilograms of plague-infected fleas to the city of Hangzhou, a holiday resort favored by Shanghai’s wealthy. From there, the germs were dumped into ponds and reservoirs and spread by aerial spraying, contaminating all life in fields of wheat and millet during the harvest.
As our train pulls into the station, Wang Xuan tells me that near here, over the small town of Quzhou, a Japanese plane dropped plague-infected fleas in October 1940. The first victims died a few days later. By 1948, more than 5,000 people had perished. Prior to that outbreak, no case of plague had ever been reported in the town, says Dr. Qiu Ming Xuan, former chief of the Quzhou Center for Disease Control.
That fact proved important in 1997, Wang explains, when she helped organize a lawsuit against Japan for spreading bubonic plague and other fatal diseases across China. Still, the town’s plague-free earlier history—as well as oral histories from elderly residents of Chongshan, a town near Quzhou, and epidemiological data from local and provincial files—might not have been sufficient to persuade the court to side with the Chinese plaintiffs, since biological samples from the 1940 attack were no longer available. But Chongshan’s survivors submitted to the court an original document: the working diary of a senior Japanese military officer, then stationed in Nanjing, responsible for contacts between his forces and Unit 731. The diary mentioned a plague attack on Quzhou on October 4, 1940—a date that coincided perfectly with the plague’s spread from Quzhou to Chongshan.
In 2002, the Japanese court finally ruled that Japan had indeed used biological weapons against China—the first such official acknowledgment. But the court also ruled that the Chinese were not entitled to compensation under international law. Nor did Tokyo itself acknowledge having used germ weapons during the war or apologize to the Chinese victims. Since then, a succession of Japanese governments has remained silent about the crimes.
Sufferers from “rotten leg disease” have no comparable diary entry or official Japanese source that could prove to a court that their suffering was related to Japan’s germ-weapons attacks. Indeed, even some Japanese researchers sympathetic to China challenge the claim that Japan’s biowarfare caused the disease. Keiichi Tsuneishi, a distinguished Japanese historian who helped uncover Japan’s atrocities in China, says that a bacterium native to the region could have been responsible, and he estimates that pathogens killed no more than 1,000 Chinese in the province of Zhejiang.
Wang Xuan responds that Tsuneishi is neither a biologist nor a physician and that he has never visited the affected regions. Refusing to yield to such challengers, she recruited four university students last summer to interview “rotten leg” survivors of the 1942 outbreak and to locate more victims. According to both Qiu and the students, in the villages surrounding the small city of Jinhua in central Zhejiang, 5 percent of the residents born before 1942 described having developed raw, festering wounds on their legs similar to those of the patients I saw.
In Blood-Weeping Accusations, a book in Chinese and English published by the Chinese Communist Party in 2005, some Chinese researchers conclude that anthrax caused the wounds. But at least two American physicians—Martin Furmanski, a pathologist and physician who wrote an essay in the book, and Michael Franzblau, a retired professor of dermatology at the University of California—believe that the culprit is Burkholderia mallei, or glanders. A horrendous skin disease that usually strikes horses, donkeys, and mules, glanders in humans is “exquisitely painful,” Furmanski says. Left untreated, it causes deep wounds that will not heal unless treated with antibiotics. “Pustules come up from below, point, break, and ooze a pussy fluid,” Furmanski explains. “Untreated, they can stay for months or even years. Only rarely do they heal. And when they occasionally do, you get a terrible scar.” Cutaneous anthrax, by contrast, starts as a lesion on the skin that blackens and swells. “You look like the Michelin man,” he says—but when it heals, it doesn’t leave a scar.
Furmanski became convinced that glanders, not anthrax, was the cause of “rotten leg disease” after he and Franzblau toured Quzhou with Wang Xuan in 2002. While taking a sample from a wound 60 years after the initial exposure probably would not reveal the identity of the original infectious agent, it might shed light on the nature of the infection or how best to treat it, he notes. But Furmanski says that he didn’t try to culture a sample and take it back to America because he hadn’t requested China’s permission. Moreover, the shipment of glanders is restricted in America, given its potential use as a biological weapon, he adds. Indeed, glanders remains a research subject at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, the military’s premier biodefense lab, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. “Legally, I couldn’t bring it back into the United States,” Furmanski says.
Working closely with Wang, Franzblau has tried for years to introduce a resolution at World Medical Association meetings calling upon doctors to ask Japan to “officially repudiate Unit 731” and to explain “why physicians employed in Unit 731 have never been prosecuted for murder and crimes against humanity.” Each year, his resolution has gone nowhere. “There has never even been a debate,” he complains. The Japanese Medical Association has also remained silent, perhaps because one former president of the JMA was a Unit 731 staff member, as were former officials in many prestigious Japanese organizations.
Wang has raised tens of thousands of dollars to provide survivors the medical care they so desperately need. The Chinese government has done little to care for them, she says. Nor has any money come from Japanese organizations or individuals, unsurprisingly. And she has another fear: “I am worried that when these people die, the memory of what Japan did in China will die with them.”
According to Jan van Aken, a German writer, activist, and now Bundestag member who accompanied Wang on a tour of the region in 2006, “almost the entire microbiology elite of wartime Japan may have been involved in one way or the other in the heinous crimes of Unit 731.” In postwar Germany, by contrast, doctors who participated in similar experiments were exposed and convicted of crimes against humanity. “The time has come for Japan to appoint an independent, international commission, to investigate and publicly document, without restraints, the involvement of former members of their profession,” says van Aken. “This was the most intensive use of biological weapons in modern history. Yet Japan remains silent. And so do most of us.”
Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a FOX News contributor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
