Today's Globe and Mail has an update on the China-wide anti-Japan demonstrations which were the subject of Walt's post yesterday. I wondered whether the protests could have been orchestrated by China's Communist government to divert attention from domestic political troubles.
Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist and designer, think so. The Globe quotes him as saying, "It’s all staged. Only the Japanese could help us to have such a demonstration. We haven’t had such street protests for decades. The Japanese are helping us get back our rights."
Here's another coincidence which lends support to Walt's theory. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the so-called Mukden Incident of 1931, at "attack" on a Japanese-owned railroad in Manchuria which the Japanese used as an excuse for the invasion of that northern-most part of China. Even when Sino-Japanese relationships are relatively good, there are always demonstrations on that date, since it was effectively the beginning of the Japanese-Chinese war.
Agent 78 asks how I know that it's not the Japanese who are engineering the attacks on their consulates and businesses, as was done at Mukden, so they can invade China. I reply that the 1000s of protesters look Chinese to me. And yes, I can tell the difference at a glance.
In yet another coincidence, tomorrow will also see the start of the treason trial of Wang Lijun, the former chief of police chief of Chongqing, who blew the whistle on the now disgraced [and disappeared? Ed.] Bo Xilai, whose wife was just convicted of arranging the murder of a British businessman who, it was said, had assisted the Bo family in certain nefarious business dealings. The demonstrations should push this story well below the bottom of the fold on page 16 of the People's Daily.
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