Sept. 18 is unofficially National Humiliation Day in China, a day when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) commemorates Japanese aggression and atrocities. It is a time for wallowing in the national obsession with a century of indignities inflicted on a weak China until the CCP came to power in 1949. But the ignominies perpetrated by the Japanese cast the longest shadow in this vault of nightmares.
Humiliation is "celebrated" on the day in 1931 when Japanese troops staged a bombing of the Japanese railway in Mukden and blamed it on the Chinese, providing a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. The resulting puppet state of Manchukuo was Japan's quasi-colony. Tensions and outbreaks of violence continued in border regions in northern China with matters coming to a head on July 7, 1937 at Marco Polo Bridge on the outskirts of Beijing where skirmishing escalated into eight long years of war.
Ten years ago on this sensitive date, Chinese police raided a hotel where 400 Japanese company employees on a junket in the southern city of Zhuhai were having a three day "orgy" with 500 Chinese prostitutes, igniting nationalistic outrage about Japan's wartime conduct. Certainly thoughtless, but one wonders how much longer China will keep vanquishing these particular ghosts of the past; its not like there is any shortage of other hobgoblins.