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Opinion | Mao Zedong thought Japan did the Communist Party a great favour by invading China. Can Hong Kong agree with that?
- The Chinese leader believed his party could not have come to power if the Japanese had not invaded. Hong Kong’s education secretary, in framing the issue about the DSE exam question as one of political correctness, is missing the point
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Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung Yun-hung said there could only be one answer to the question in the Diploma of Secondary Education history exam regarding Sino-Japanese relations between 1900 and 1945: Japan had done China harm, and no good at all, during the second Sino-Japanese war.
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On the face of it, few people could disagree with this. How could an invasion that resulted in the loss of millions of lives be good in any sense of the word? But this is to fail to take into account the strategic thinking of Chairman Mao Zedong.
As students of Sino-Japanese history know, Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka flew to Beijing in September 1972 to normalise diplomatic relations with China, and met premier Zhou Enlai and Mao. Before beginning a discussion of sensitive political issues, including the disputed islands called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, Tanaka started to apologise for Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s.
Surprisingly, Mao told him there was no need to apologise. Japan, Mao said, had done the Communist Party a great favour.
“We must express our gratitude to Japan,” Mao said. “If Japan didn’t invade China, we could have never achieved the cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. We could have never developed and eventually taken political power for ourselves. It is due to Japan’s help that we are able to meet here in Beijing.”
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