The death of a Japanese boy, stabbed on Wednesday 18 September while on his way to school in Shenzhen, in south-east China, has stirred strong emotions and anguish in the Japanese expatriate community. It has also cast a new chill on the difficult bilateral relations between the two countries. The ten-year-old boy, whose father is Japanese and whose mother is Chinese, was attacked with a knife, the second such attack in several months. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida denounced a “particularly despicable crime”.
Japanese Ambassador to Beijing Kenji Kanasugi “urgently requested”During a telephone conversation with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong, he asked that all information on this crime be shared and security around schools for Japanese living in China be strengthened. Chinese diplomacy considers this to be a crime “isolated incident”The attacker, a 44-year-old man, has already been arrested several times in the past, notably for disturbing the peace.
A year of diplomatic cold
Most major Japanese groups, including Toyota, Nissan and Toshiba, have asked their Japanese employees in China to be cautious and said they were looking into safety protocols at schools. Panasonic is allowing expatriate families to return to Japan temporarily if they wish and covering the costs.
Already in the weeks leading up to this attack, relations between China and the archipelago had deteriorated, due to new Chinese military gestures, while tensions have risen in the South China Sea and off the coast of the Philippines in recent years. On August 26, a People’s Liberation Army reconnaissance plane entered Japanese airspace for two minutes, an unprecedented incursion. Then, on Wednesday, September 18, a Chinese aircraft carrier, the LiaoningIt was sailing in the Japanese zone when it took a new route between two islands, Yonaguni and Ishigaki, located 140 kilometers east of Taiwan.
The Shenzhen attack took place on the day that marks the start of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. It comes after a year of diplomatic frostiness, during which China accused its neighbour of polluting the oceans by having begun, on 24 August 2023, to discharge water from the Fukushima power plant into the sea, despite reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) indicating that they were in compliance with international standards. The intense media hype around the issue had mobilised the Chinese, who were genuinely concerned about the consequences for their health and the environment. Beijing had since suspended its imports of all Japanese fishery products.
You have 39.56% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
