After two earthquakes struck the Japanese island of Kyushu on April 15, leaving dozens dead and 200,000 homeless, several Chinese companies have taken advantage of intense anti-Japanese feelings to drive sales.
Hong Kong’s Apple Daily reported April 17 that a southwestern Chinese company specializing in security products offered discounts in order to “celebrate the great Japanese earthquake,” as stated by the firm in a post to Sina Weibo, a microblogging platform.
The company’s statement, now deleted (but preserved by Internet users), continues: “The promotion will go on as long as the aftershock continues. If the earthquake reaches magnitude 9, prices will be lowered again. If all of Japanese perish, we will drop the prices drastically. If Japan sinks to the sea bottom, all of our products are yours!”
Two other companies, in Zhejiang and Shaanxi Provinces, offered similar “celebratory” discounts, according to Apple Daily. The Shaanxi company’s statement was also preserved in a screenshot before it was deleted.
As it turns out, the security company in Kunming, Yunnan Province, was just trying to make money with its provocative statement, it said. In an exploratory post, the company said that “one stone tossed creates a thousand ripples” and that they had “achieved [their] purpose.”
Anti-Japanese feelings in China are borne of the country’s brutal occupation by Imperial Japanese forces in World War II, but propaganda—particularly movies and TV shows, but also textbooks and other educational materials— sponsored by the Chinese regime’s state media has heavily magnified and intensified these sentiments in the name of patriotism.
Fenqing, a term collectively referring to hot-headed youth who demonize Japan online (and sometimes offline), is a prominent manifestation of this propaganda trope. In 2010, a 22-year-old man in China beat the driver of a Japanese-made car with a U-lock, cracking his skull.
