Until recently, the Japanese Embassy in Beijing was a low-key affair—a boxy, off-white building with a droopy spruce in the front yard, set back from a side road by about the distance of a tossed egg. Not anymore. When the Embassy moved a few miles north this year it settled into a structure that conforms, unfortunately but perhaps wisely, to the architectural expression of its relationship to the host country—a six-story fortress painted gun-metal gray, with windows shielded by grates, set back by half a football field from the road outside.
But when I visited on Tuesday, I couldn’t help but sense that the Japanese were not the only ones nervous. Over the weekend, anti-Japanese protests, triggered by a dispute over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, led to violence and rioting. It was a rare sight in China, and the vandalized stores and cars left behind were a reminder of how quickly things can get out of hand. By Tuesday, authorities had clearly decided they would tolerate it no longer. By contrast, this protest was a parade. The police had organized the demonstrators into bunches, allowing them to stream by the front of the Embassy for a moment to throw water bottles at the granite and steel gate, before they were ushered on to make way for the next group. Separating them from the gate were rows of riot troops in camouflage. It was a rare blue sky in Beijing, and the protesters seemed unhurried as they moved in orderly packs, carrying banners denouncing “Japanese dogs” and vowing never to give in.
Police equaled or outnumbered protesters, and they had been issued megaphones to whisk people along when they lingered. About halfway down the protest route, I heard the recorded voice of a woman, and initially thought it was a recording from the protesters. It took me a second to realize it was coming from the police station, and the message was not directed to the Japanese at all. In Chinese, it said:
Moving along the sidewalks with the protesters and onlookers and police, I was struck most of all by how hard the Chinese government was working to keep its people happy, to show them that it is doing what they want. Nationalism is a volatile force, and it would be easy for protests to expand into criticism of the state. Chinese authorities have no choice but to let their people blow off steam over Japan, but they are determined to keep them on message.
Photograph by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.
