Why China pulled the plug on Japan

0:01NPR

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Darian Woods, and today we have NPR's international correspondent Emily Fang on with us. Hey, Emily. Always a pleasure. Glad to be with you, Darian. And what do we have today? I have a story for you about boycotts. And this particular one started with China being very mad at Japan. These two countries have been in a bit of a diplomatic chill. And the Chinese state, as a result, has been shaping what people can and cannot buy from Japan. We usually think about boycotts as these bottom-up groundswells of public anger. But for today's episode, I want to look at how a state can organize a boycott, whether they work, and what the purpose of a boycott even is.

1:00This spat between China and Japan all started with these remarks from Japan's new Prime Minister, Sanai Takeichi, in early November. She's addressing Japan's parliament, and she says if China deploys warships with the use of military force against Taiwan, that that could lead to a survival-threatening situation for Japan. Which, Darian, to me that sounds pretty mundane. But technically, her comments implied if China invaded Taiwan, this democratic island that China wants to control one day, that if that happened, Japan would get involved militarily. Beijing freaks out over these sentences. It orders officials to pressure her to retract her statement, threatening consequences.

1:45And those consequences hit hard pretty quickly. To understand what those consequences were, I called Christian Peterson Clausen in Shanghai. He's a filmmaker, and he also organizes concerts all across China. The audiences here are quite sophisticated. This fall, he had some great Japanese artists coming through Shanghai, but they get canceled due to this fallout with Japan. One of the concerts was with this Japanese bassist who has kind of a cult following in China now. I love those bass notes. As Christian tells it, he and the musician Yoshio Suzuki were doing last-minute soundchecks this past November.

2:26At 3.30 in the afternoon, and I was standing in the lifehouse talking with the owner. And suddenly the owner looks to the entrance and there's a man in civilian clothes coming in. And he says, oh, I have to go talk to him. They talk for one minute. The owner comes back and says to me, the police has canceled all concerts with Japanese musicians. And they said, no discussion. And so I had to go on stage where they were doing their soundcheck and break the 80-year-old man's heart. Which I don't say lightly. I mean, he legitimately cried. And then the same thing happens to another Japanese jazz musician, Toshio Osumi, who Christian is also invited.

3:10Plays this really mellow jazz music. But right before his concert, Christian gets a text from someone saying that their ticket was suddenly refunded. Yeah, that's how we found out. They didn't even tell us to our face. And around the same time, there's another Japanese singer, Maki Otsuki. and there's this video of her singing her heart out and the lights just suddenly go out on her. And a technician runs onto the stage and tells her her show is being cancelled right there and then and she just has this look of shock on her face, Darian, as she's bundled offstage. And then on top of all these cancellations, Chinese authorities were warning people not to travel to Japan and were actually cancelling group tours there.

3:52Chinese tourism into Japan plummeted in November. They've also effectively banned Japanese seafood imports and even delayed Japanese films from being shown in China. But Emily, do you have a sense of whether Chinese people agree with these state boycott measures? Well, Japan once invaded parts of China during World War II, committed horrible atrocities, and so there is genuine latent anger that the state is definitely tapping into. But at the same time, if you're an ordinary person in China, you're getting pretty strong signals from your own government that Japan equals bad right now. And so the line between boycotts and state sanctions is pretty fuzzy here.

4:34You've got Beijing trying to make these bans look as ground up as possible, whether that's like a community boycott or a city authority banning Japanese musicians. And one of the possible reasons for this is Beijing gets plausible deniability when it shapes boycotts behind the scenes like this. It gets to claim that there is true outrage over Japan's comments and that Tokyo has really hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, as it likes to say. I think it is mostly a political signaling mechanism. This is Jeremy Wallace. He's a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

5:09And he wrote a paper on a prior Chinese state-organized boycott, plus street protests against Japan, which all kicked off in 2012 when the two countries were arguing over who owned a cluster of islands. People on the street going after symbols of Japan inside of the country. So Japanese restaurants, Japanese auto dealerships, what have you. And some of those were even violent, mostly against property, not against people, but still like real kind of like quite dramatic scenes. So Jeremy describes boycotts as a kind of censorship mechanism. You're trying to get people or a company, in this case a country, to behave in a way that's more beneficial to you by leveraging economic access.

5:54I think the Chinese state knows that it has a huge consumer market and revels and takes advantage of that in its economic state prep. Somebody could argue that that sounds a bit like bullying. You could argue that, but perhaps there's a different way, Darian, of looking at boycotts. Perhaps they can actually diffuse a tense diplomatic situation. It has domestic purposes that is much less drastic than sending warships or something towards some other country as a symbol of frustration. As in, through a state boycott, you can vent your unhappiness without escalating the situation. But this costs China as well.

6:41Christian, the concert organizer, explains he's had prospective investors pull out of potential projects in China because they don't know when an event could just be called off. And this is repeating across China among the tour agencies, which have had to cancel their trips to Japan, or Chinese-run restaurants that just happen to serve Japanese food, which is really popular in China. And they're seeing their foot traffic drop. And China frequently does this. You know, it encourages boycotts regionally over geopolitics. Filmmaker Christian Peterson-Klausen recalls another country that attracted China's ire.

7:15China does seem to see good business relations as a privilege for other countries. I mean, if you look back to the Korean FAD crisis. So the FAD crisis tripped out memory lane. This started in 2016 when South Korea allowed the U.S. to set up an anti-missile system and China protested. South Korean musicians are still unable to perform in China. They just don't get performance visa. Except it didn't work the way Beijing imagined. In South Korea's case, they chose to endure that economic pain for a year. They kept the missile defense system. And Beijing was not willing to escalate beyond economic pressure.

7:58But in Japan's case, China has continued to pile on. Right. Chinese officials continue to say they're not satisfied with Japan's later clarifications on its prime minister statements on Taiwan. And then in mid-December, China decided to take back the last two pandas it had loaned to Japan. Panda diplomacy strikes again. This is getting serious. So in general, this is a low-cost way to send a message to Japan to try to shape another country's behavior without using military pressure. And if Beijing can really squeeze an apology out of Tokyo, then maybe this boycott is actually a pretty efficient way to raise a big political fuss.

8:38Especially for a country of China's size. This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim and engineered by Jimmy Keely. It was fact-checked by Corey Bridges. The entire episode was edited by Julia Ritchie. Kate Kincannon is our editor. The Indicator is a production of NPR.