The Contest of the Century by Geoff A. Dyer

Author:Geoff A. Dyer [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-96078-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

MEMORIES OF A HOLOCAUST

When we moved to Shanghai in early 2005, my wife and I rented a flat on Huai Hai Road, one of the main streets running through what in colonial days was known as the French Concession. In a city that has become overrun by skyscrapers, the area is a museum of prewar Western architecture. One block away from our flat was the Normandie Apartments, a wedge-shaped building reminiscent of the Flatiron Building in New York; three blocks in the other direction was a Russian basilica. Its avenues lined with plane trees planted by the French, the area has an unhurried feel that is a welcome break from Shanghai’s frenetic pace. It has become a popular neighborhood for foreigners, including the tens of thousands of Japanese who now call Shanghai home. Many of the shops along Huai Hai Road had Japanese writing in the windows to attract customers, including the tailor on our block and the tobacco store run by a couple from Anhui Province.

At about the same time that we arrived in Shanghai, a group of right-wing historians in Japan published a new textbook which downplayed important aspects of the war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers in China. One of the books described the evidence behind the massacre in Nanjing in 1937 as “inconclusive.” It was not the first revisionist textbook in Japan to minimize war crimes, and it was only taken up by a small number of schools. But it caused a furor in China. Meetings with Japanese politicians were canceled, official protests lodged. After a few weeks, messages started to circulate on the Internet about a demonstration in Shanghai on the following Saturday. “A lot of people are talking,” one of our new Chinese acquaintances told us a couple of days before the demonstration.

At around 10 a.m. that Saturday, we headed out to try and find the protest, only to discover that our section of Huai Hai Road had already been totally closed off to traffic. After walking up the street, we could eventually see the beachhead of a demonstration that looked to be much bigger than the modest protest we had been expecting. The group had started near the Bund and had already halted the traffic in some of the city’s busiest shopping and business areas. The demonstrators were all young, mostly university or high-school students. Older residents watched from the sidewalk, a little bemused, not quite knowing what to think. The protest gathered numbers along the way until it had at least ten thousand people by some counts—making it one of the biggest public demonstrations since the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. The students carried banners and shouted slogans such as “Down with Little Japan,” “Japan Out of Asia,” and “We Love Our China, We Hate Your Japan.” By the time they reached our stretch of town, they had developed a distinct sense of impunity. When they passed a little sushi restaurant a block away from our flat, they threw eggs and plastic bottles at the windows, as well as red paint.

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