Why Are Chinese Students Defending Russia Against Japan? | Digging into China

Hi, I'm Dongshuang. Welcome to Digging into China where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. I have to admit, when I read the People's Daily's commentary on a Chinese student who wore Japan's Rising Sun flag at Moscow State University, my first reaction was not anger, it was laughter. Not because the flag is harmless, it isn't. The rising sun flag is associated with imperial Japan's military aggression, and for many Chinese people, it carries painful historical memories. Japan's invasion of China caused immense suffering, and nobody needs to deny that history. What made me laugh was something else. The incident happened in Russia. The flag belonged to a country that fought a major war against Russia on Chinese soil. Yet according to the accounts circulating about the incident, the people who reacted most aggressively were Chinese students, while the controversy was This was driven into a major political issue by Chinese official media. Think about that for a moment. Why are Chinese students in a Russian classroom so eager to defend Russia against a Japanese historical symbol? Why is the Chinese government so determined to turn this into a demonstration of patriotism? And why does this kind of incident reveal something much stranger about the way the Communist Party has educated China's younger generation? To understand the absurdity, we need to revisit a piece of history that the Chinese official education rarely explains in sufficient detail. The story begins in 1895 when China lost the first Sino-Japanese war. The Qing dynasty signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, conceding Taiwan and the Penghu Islands and agreeing to cede the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan, among other concessions. Japan had won the war, and it expected to keep the territories and privileges stipulated in the treaty. But six days later, Russia, Germany, and France intervened. They pressured Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China. This episode became known as the Triple Intervention. At first glance, it might look as though Russia was defending China against Japanese expansion. This is certainly the kind of interpretation that can be drawn if you stop the story there. But history did not stop there. Russia had its own ambitions in northeastern China. It wanted strategic access to the Pacific and greater influence over the region. After helping force Japan to surrender the Liaodong Peninsula, Russia moved to establish its own position there. In 1896, Russia secured the railway building privileges in northeastern China. In 1898, it obtained a lease over the Liaodong Peninsula, including Port Arthur and Dalian. The railway network extended its strategic reach into Manchuria. In other words, Russia helped prevent Japan from consolidating its position in the region only to establish its own presence in the same territory. Japan was furious. Its leaders had been forced to accept a diplomatic humiliation, and resentment toward Russia became a major factor in Japanese strategic thinking. Then came the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Russia sent a large military force into Manchuria, ostensibly to protect its railway interests. Russian troops occupied much of the region and committed serious violence against Chinese civilians. During the Blagoveshchensk massacre and related expulsions across the Amur region, thousands of Chinese people were killed or driven from their homes. The exact death toll remains disputed, but the scale of the suffering was substantial. Russia subsequently agreed to withdraw its forces in stages, but the withdrawal stalled, and the Russian demands threatened to entrench its control over Manchuria. Japan saw this expansion as a direct threat to its own interests in Korea and northeastern China. Britain, concerned about Russia's growing influence in Asia, signed an alliance with Japan in 1902. Negotiations between Russia and Japan failed. In February 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, beginning the Russo-Japanese War. The conflict was fought largely over competing imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. And where was this war fought? On Chinese soil. China was the country whose territory had been occupied, whose population suffered the consequences, and whose future was being shaped by two foreign empires. This is the part of the story that makes the Moscow incident so interesting. Russia was not simply Japan's historical victim. It was also an imperial power that had taken advantage of China's weakness and pursued its own territorial ambitions at China's expense. So if a Chinese student really wants to remember history, why does the rising sun flag automatically become a reason to defend Russia? More importantly, why does the CCP's official narrative make that response seem so natural? Let's look at what happened during the war itself. The Russo-Japanese War was one of the bloodiest conflicts of its time. Japan's army suffered enormous casualties during the siege of Port Arthur, where repeated frontal assaults against Russian fortifications cost thousands of lives. The battles around the Liaoyang and the Shao River consumed enormous amounts of manpower and resources. In early 1905, the Battle of Mukden involved hundreds of thousands of troops. It was one of the largest land battles in the world up to that time. Japan eventually won the campaign, but its military resources were severely strained. Russia, meanwhile, was suffering from military defeats, economic disruption, and growing political unrest at home. The decisive blow came at sea. Russia sent its Baltic fleet on an extraordinary voyage from Europe to East Asia. The fleet traveled thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope and eventually entered the waters near the Tsushima Strait in May 1905. There, the Japanese navy under Admiral Togo Togo Heihachiro inflicted a devastating defeat. Much of the Russian fleet was sunk or captured. Japan had demonstrated that an Asian power could defeat a major European empire in modern warfare. For Japan, this was a tremendous military and psychological victory. For Russia, it was a humiliation. The defeat also had consequences far beyond the battlefield. The war had exposed the weakness of the Tsarist regime, intensified public dissatisfaction, and contributed to the conditions that produced the Russian Revolution of 1905. That revolution did not overthrow the monarchy, but it weakened the regime and became an important precursor to the upheavals of 1917. Here is where the story becomes particularly ironic for the Chinese Communist Party. The Bolshevik eventually seized power in Russia in 1917. Their victory helped create the political and ideological conditions under which communism spread internationally, including into China. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, with support from the Communist International and later substantial assistance from the Soviet Union. Of course, Japan's victory in 1905 did not directly create the CCP. The Russian Revolution had many causes, and the Chinese Communist movement emerged from a much broader set of circumstances. But the Russo-Japanese War helped weaken the Tsarist system and contributed to the revolutionary crisis that followed. The historical chain is complicated, but the connection is real. So here is the irony. The Chinese Communist Party now cultivates a political culture in which young Chinese people feel compelled to defend Russia against a Japanese historical symbol. Even though Japan's victory over Russia helped destabilize the old Russian order that was eventually replaced by the Bolshevik regime from which the CCP drew ideological inspiration. That is a much more interesting historical contradiction than the simple claim that one flag represents evil and another country represents friendship. And it raises a question that the official Chinese narrative rarely encourages young people to ask. If history is so important, why is the historical interpretation so dependent on present-day political alliances? Russia today is not the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was not the Russian Empire. These are different political systems, separated by revolutions and enormous historical changes. But the CCP's relationship with Russia has encouraged a highly selective way of remembering the past. Russia's imperial expansion against China receives relatively little attention in popular patriotic education, Compared with Japanese aggression, the suffering caused by Russian forces during the 19th and early 20th centuries does not occupy the same places in the national consciousness as the Nanjing Massacre or the Japanese invasion. This imbalance is not accidental in its political effect. The CCP wants Chinese people to remember history in a way that reinforces its current foreign policy and domestic legitimacy. Japan's wartime atrocities are an essential part of modern Chinese history. But the Party also uses the memory of Japanese aggression to reinforce a broader political message. China was humiliated by foreign powers. The Communist Party rescued the nation, and the Party's continued leadership is essential to China's strength and dignity. The historical narrative becomes a political asset. The problem is that once history is organized around a political message, inconvenient details become less important. The story is no longer simply about what happened. It is about which lessons the government wants people to draw from what happened. And that brings us back to the young Chinese students in Moscow. The CCP's propaganda system has spent decades teaching young people to associate Japan with historical humiliation, national suffering, and the danger of militarism. It has also cultivated the idea that demonstrating outrage over certain symbols is evidence of patriotism. When an incident like this occurs, Some students do not merely express personal disagreement. They mobilize, gather evidence, issue public condemnations, appeal to university authorities, and report the incident to Chinese official institutions. In this case, reports said the Chinese Students and Scholars Association contacted the university and the Chinese embassy. Chinese state media amplified the controversy, and the People's Liberation Army's official social media commentary also condemned the students' conduct. The university subsequently moved toward disciplinary action, according to reports. Some of this response may have been motivated by sincere anger. A student who displays a military symbol associated with historical aggression in a provocative way should expect criticism, especially in a history classroom. But what stands out is the speed with which a classroom incident becomes a national test of loyalty. The student was not displaying the flag in Nanjing, where the memory of Japanese atrocities carries particular weight. He was not displaying it at a Chinese war memorial. He was in Moscow, studying at a Russian university. And yet, Chinese students and institutions took the lead in turning the incident into a major political controversy. The Russian setting is not a minor detail. It is the key to understanding the strange dynamic. If the flag's historical meaning is the central issue, Russia has its own reasons to remember the war against Japan. The defeat of 1905 was a major national humiliation, and the Soviet Union later fought Japan in the final days of the Second World War. Russia and Japan also remained divided over the disputed southern Kuril Islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories. Russia has its own complicated historical relationship with Japan. But that does not mean every Russian must react to the rising sun flag in the same way or that silence from Russian students proves indifference. We cannot know what every person in that classroom thought, nor can we assume that the Russian students were entirely unconcerned. The available accounts do not establish that. What we can say is that the public controversy was driven especially forcefully by Chinese students and Chinese state institutions. The Chinese response became a political spectacle in a way that the original classroom incident might not otherwise have become. That is the revealing contrast. Why are Chinese students so eager to demonstrate their historical indignation on behalf of Russia, while the Chinese government itself has built a strategic partnership with a country whose imperial past includes serious aggression against China? The answer lies in the way the CCP has shaped historical consciousness. It has cultivated a generation that often encounters history less as an open field of inquiry than as a collection of politically charged symbols. A Japanese flag becomes a test of patriotism. A historical grievance becomes an obligation to react. A public denunciation becomes proof that one belongs to the correct national community. This is what I mean when I say the CCP has cultivated a strange generation of Chinese youth. I do not mean that all young Chinese people are brainwashed or they lack intelligence. China's younger generation includes many capable, thoughtful, and independent people. Some question official narratives openly, others do so privately. The problem is the political environment in which they have grown up. They have been exposed to a nationalistic education system that emphasizes certain historical injuries while giving less prominence to others. They have grown up in an online environment where expressions of patriotic anger can receive enormous attention and approval. They have learned that taking a strong public position against a politically disfavored symbol can be safer and more rewarding than asking inconvenient questions about the historical record. This can produce a peculiar form of nationalism, highly emotional, intensely reactive, and remarkably selective. A person can know that Japan invaded China without knowing much about Russia's occupation of Manchuria. He can condemn Japanese imperialism without examining Russia's imperialism. He can speak passionately about China's historical humiliation while accepting the present government's friendship with the country that once occupied Chinese territory. The contradiction does not necessarily occur to him because the political narrative has already supplied the categories. Japan is the historical aggressor, Russia is China's strategic partner, and therefore the two must be treated differently. This is not independent historical analysis, it is political alignment dressed up as historical memory. The CCP does not need to tell every student exactly what to think about every historical event. It is enough to establish which conclusions are respectable, which emotions are desirable, and which reactions demonstrate loyalty. Once that framework has been internalized, people begin enforcing it themselves. That is why the Moscow incident matters. It shows how official political conditioning can turn a student into an unofficial representative of the state's preferred historical narrative, even when he is thousands of miles away from China. The irony is that the students may sincerely believe they are defending their country. They may see themselves as protecting historical truths. Yet their response can reveal how little room they have been given to distinguish historical understanding from political performance. And the CCP's behavior makes the contradiction even sharper. The party wants to maintain close relations with Russia because the partnership served China's strategic interests. It also wants to cultivate anti-Japanese historical consciousness because that narrative serves domestic political purposes. These two objectives can coexist as long as the public accepts a selective interpretation of history. Russia imperialism becomes a less prominent subject. Japanese imperialism remains a central emotional reference point. The present-day alliance determines which parts of the past receives the most attention. The result is a political culture in which historical judgment can become subordinate to diplomatic convenience. That is the real absurdity of the Moscow incident. The question is not whether Japan's wartime crimes should be remembered. They should. Nor is it whether Russia and China can have a strategic partnership. They can. The question is why the CCP's version of patriotism seems to require Chinese students to react so predictably to one country's symbols while remaining far less publicly concerned about the historical records of another country that is now China's partner. A country with a confident understanding of its own history should not need to simplify the past in this way. But an authoritarian government has a different priority. It wants history to reinforce the political order, not complicate it. That is why this episode deserves more attention than another round of arguments over whether a particular flag should be allowed in a classroom. The flag is the trigger. The deeper story is the political education behind the reaction. The CCP has taught generations of Chinese citizens to associate national pride with a carefully managed historical narrative. When that narrative is challenged, some respond not by investigating the history but by demonstrating that they know which side they are supposed to be on. And in Moscow, that produced a remarkable spectacle. Chinese students rushing to defend Russia against a Japanese symbol, while the history of Russia's own ambitions in China largely disappeared from the conversation. For a government that constantly claims to teach its people to remember history, that is a revealing failure of historical education. Or perhaps it is not a failure at all. Perhaps the objective was never to teach young people the whole history in the first place. Perhaps the objective was to teach them which parts to remember, which parts to ignore, and when to become angry. If so, the Moscow incident shows just how effectively that lesson has been learned. Thank you so much for watching. If this video was helpful, please like, subscribe, and if you are watching on your phone, click hype right below. It pushes this video onto the trending hype leaderboard so more people can find my channel. I'll be back with more content soon. Until then, be well.