Anouar Abdel-Malek applauds Chinese President Jintao's visit to Japan, considering it a historic step in the formation of a new world order RARE IS THE NEW EVENT or development that transforms the world. Russia's 1917 Revolution was one. Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933 was another. General de Gaul's assumption of the leadership of Free France on 18 June 1940 and then of the presidency of the French republic was a third. Soon afterwards there followed the Chinese revolution and the epic of the creation of the People's Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. Then came more earthshaking events: the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the rise of the US as the sole global imperial pole, followed by the rise of India and Brazil to the rank of great powers. But, before then the Egyptian revolution, from the 1956 Suez War to the 1973 October War, shook the foundations of conventional western hegemony, from British and French colonialism to US neo- colonialism up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, the Iranian revolution between 1951 and 1979, which is to say from Mosaddagh to Khomeini, raised Iran to the ranks of emerging regional powers alongside and in fellowship with Egypt, the heart of the Arab world until the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978. Also in the post-World War II era, all the countries of the West without exception pushed for the partition of Palestine (1948) and the creation of a Jewish state in the heart of the Middle Eastern circle. That state -- Israel -- which seemed like an attempt to revive the pre-Christian world, ushered in sixty years of calamity for the countries at the centre of the Arab world -- Egypt, Syria and Iraq -- and by extension into Sudan and Libya; sixty years of uninterrupted threat, invasion and occupation, leading to the occupation of the Sinai, the expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people from their land, the collusion with the US to besiege Syria following the 1973 war and the attempt to rekindle the Lebanese civil war. During its fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the prime minister of the Zionist state, Ehud Barak, declared that Israel was the state of all Jews worldwide. Arab leaders and a large and influential sector of the Arab intelligentsia and media were dumbstruck at that announcement that revealed the true nature of the Zionist state and its official call to Jews around the world to immigrate to Israel, and to build a nuclear arsenal and strategic military base on Palestinian land in close alliance with the American superpower and with the support of the majority of the countries of Europe. Many Arab intellectuals hastened to denounce the fraudulence and tendentiousness of the Israeli bid to establish the Jewish character of state. This occurred at the moment when Israel launched its drive to control the entire region, following the demolition of Iraq, the second military and industrial power in the Arab world after Egypt, as the result of the criminal US invasion of that country in 2003 with the purpose of establishing American military bases to work hand in hand with the US central command in the Middle East to secure control over the region's second largest oil reserves. The ultimate objective of this is to surround the emerging oil producing circle, centring on the Caspian Sea, comprising Russia and Turkmenistan in particular, and extending along the new Silk Road: the axis for the pumping of enormous quantities of gas to China and Japan, above all. In tandem, the US launched its campaign of "constructive chaos," to fragment as many Arab states as possible into ethnic cantons so as to better secure the containment of Egypt. But then the dream of an East wind began to bear fruit in the form of the announcement of the establishment of strategic mutually beneficial relations between China, the emerging superpower rising at supersonic speed, and Japan, the second economic, industrial and technologic power in the world since the 1970s. Naturally, all television networks and most newspapers in the US and other western nations ignored this event at first and then simply shrugged it off as the beginning of an experiment that might not work. In Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, the tragedies of Lebanon and Palestine after the calamity of Iraq have kept everyone too preoccupied. The Chinese-Japanese event has not drawn the attention of any of our hundreds of national, partisan and independent newspapers. Is there an excuse for this? Or is it a manifestation of how far removed our region is from the central intellectual tides of the world? A new epoch is dawning in all of Asia, in the east and south of that continent, and along the Silk Road linking Europe to China, Korea and Southeast Asia. This channel for the exchange in trade, ideas and inventions has existed since the 12th century and has remained active in many forms. The most recent is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that stretches across two continents from Eastern Europe through Central Asia to Eastern Asia and that defines the contours of the converging axis between Russia, which has rallied from the tragedy of disintegration and resumed its place at the vanguard; China, the emerging centre that has set its sights on superpower status; and the five central Asian republics, as well as India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia. And as all this is coalescing our Arab world is elsewhere, as though in a coma. Yes, the US and Europe are the largest oil and gas consumers today. But, finally, global public opinion has realised that the needs of China, as well as Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India and Pakistan have soared so rapidly that the Arab petroleum circle will not, no matter how hard it tried, to turn its back to this transitional phase ushering a new world order, one that will put an end to Atlantic hegemony and lead most of the countries and peoples of the world to a new multi-polar, multi-centred and multi- cultured order. This is the new world order to which China is leading the way. One world, one dream! One world means an end to the control by the centre of colonialist domination and the beginning of a new history. Meanwhile, try as they might, the countries of the current hegemonic centre will not be able to keep that emerging eastern civilisational world -- stretching from the Mediterranean basin to the Pacific Ocean -- from converging with the emerging power of Latin America, whether represented by revolutionary socialist regimes (Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia) or by progressive member states of MERCOSOR. However, there has been a weak point in this historic rise that has not coalesced around major pacts, such as NATO. But then, suddenly, the emerging superpower and the industrial and technological giant have presented us with the missing key. The Chinese-Japanese project of strategic cooperation proclaims the beginning of the creation of a mighty central core, after six centuries of exclusion, dependency and racism. What is this story of China and Japan? How could it not have been anticipated? How did it become possible? Where is it heading? What is the secret of that springtime visit by the Chinese president to Japan in early May 2008? JOURNEY TO THE NEW WORLD: Following the Meiji Restoration (1868) Japan moved with lightning speed to absorb all the West had to offer in terms of sciences, ideas and technology. By the 1930s -- i.e. in the space of half a century -- it had become the foremost power in Asia. At that point, Japan invaded the Chinese mainland, first in Korea and then in Manchuria in the north, in the course of which it resorted to the most brutal violence. As part of its campaign to contain the emerging Japanese economic power, the American fleet began to mobilise at its chief Pacific base in Pearl Harbor. This was in 1941, a year after the onset of World War II. Meanwhile, following the Chinese tragedy, Japanese forces began to sweep through all countries in Northeast and Southeast Asia, to the drum of the fight against western colonialism. This major campaign reached its zenith in the close relationship between Japan and Subhas Chandra Bose who led the Indian National Army in a campaign against the British Raj until, in October 1943, he succeeded in proclaiming the Provisional Government of Free India. It is important to bear in mind this duality in Japan's role as an enemy of western imperialism and ally of revolutionary liberation movements in South and Southeast Asia, on one hand, and its role as an ally of the Axis powers and as a fascist-colonialist power, on the other. This duality came to an end with the advent of World War II. During that war the US, as modest as its political vanguards were, realised that the Japanese economy stood stubbornly and ready to fight against any attempts on the part of the US and other western nations to seize control over what was called the Asia-Pacific ring -- as though the western coast of the Pacific, where Japan, Korea, the Chinese seaboard, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries are located, were merely one long beach belonging to the so-called Far East. When Japan took stock of America's steadily mounting hostility, it dispatched a squadron of fighter planes and bombarded Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Within a couple of hours 19 US Navy vessels were sunk and 2,000 men lost. Why December 1941? Because the attack was timed to coincide with Germany's eastern offensive against the Soviet Union, which had set off on 21 June that year, setting into motion Russia's great patriotic war of self- defence commanded by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party with the uninterrupted support of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hitler's mighty invading forces advanced steadily into Russia until one prong of its advance was broken in the battles of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-1943, and of Kursk in May 1943. At the same time, however, the Germans laid siege to Leningrad for more than two years, from September 1941 to January 1943, during which 600,000 people died and a million went missing. In the war on the eastern front, as a whole, 27 million Soviets died and some 10,000 towns and villages were flattened between Russia's western border and the Ural Mountains, forcing the Soviets to move their entire industrial network and major economic institutions into Siberia on the other side of that range, which momentous task Khrushchev undertook at the time. In the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, another theatre of war was opened on the Asian front with the aim of defeating Japan, when suddenly and unexpectedly there soared onto the historical stage a political comet in the form of the young Mao Zedong at the head of a people's liberation army. Simultaneously, in the north the Korean resistance had succeeded, after two years, in sweeping the entire peninsula while to the south the heroic Vietnamese people inaugurated a quarter-century long liberation struggle, against the French colonial power at first and then against the US, led by Ho Chi Minh and General V� Nguyên Giàp, the most illustrious military commanders of the East since Salah Al-Din and Genghis Khan. Thus, after a history of expansionism into China and Korea and, simultaneously, of backing national liberation revolutions in South and Southeast Asia, the Japanese military machine became the most formidable power in the way of American imperialism. However, with the Soviet Union's declaration of war on its eastern front, Japan's position became increasingly precarious. Although Japan had slowly begun to retreat as of June 1942, the morale of its forces remained strong until 1945, when the US decided to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These atrocities occurred on August 6 and 9, even as Tokyo continued to burn to the ground as the result of continuous fire-bombing raids, such as those that were unleashed by the British and American air forces against Dresden, the pearl of German culture; Hamburg, Germany's major port, and the German capital Berlin. Japan lost more than two million soldiers and more than a quarter of a million civilians that summer, compelling Emperor Hirohito to surrender, accept a US occupation commanded by General McArthur, and agree to a constitution imposed by the US prohibiting Japan from possessing instruments of war and reducing its once mighty military machine to a civil defence force. FROM DEMOLITION TO POWER: How did Japan, within the space of 25 years after defeat and occupation in 1945, become the world's second largest economic power? How did that country whose three major cities were levelled, two by atomic bombs and one by fire-bombing, and whose people had been reduced to years of famine, become self-sufficient in rice? This is the epic of Japan's quarter of a century rise from the lower depth of devastation to the pinnacle of global economic might. First came a period of calm among the ruins and smouldering embers, overseen by Prime Minister Shidehara, the first person chosen by the emperor outside of the imperial family to assume this position. Shidehara undertook the task of working with McArthur to draft the country's new constitution, article 9 of which would prevent Japan from possessing a military equipped for combat. According to Shidehara, 6 August 1945 was a turning point in world history. Before that date, the nation state represented the best possible scientific and technological instrument for defence. After that date, that concept became an obstacle; indeed, an intellectual absurdity. For now, the entire world, and not just Japan, needed a constitution that would guarantee the survival of the modern state in a sane and rational way. Shidehara was one of a small minority that had opposed the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. After World War II, the destruction of Japan and the US occupation, and during the drafting of the new constitution, this eminent statesman decided that Japan had no alternative but to reconcile itself to being a minority, a country that would have to press forward as a power that advanced peace in the midst of a barbarian world whose peoples and nations continued to cling to the outmoded insane concept of the nation state. Few are the politicians in Japan who recall the name of this remarkable intellectual statesman who set his country on the steady though cautious road to the rank of leading nations, not as an agent for the American imperial centre, but at the vanguard of those effective forces striving to forge a new world. Here then, is a key to understanding the historic significance of the spring visit by Chinese President Jintao to Japan, where he spent five days filled with consultations over and the fine-tuning of the plans for a strategy for a mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries. NEW KNOWLEDGE: When Japan started to rebuild itself in the wake of World War II, it was a marginal nation in a bipolar global order. It is important to take a closer look at the thorny path that had led Japan from the Meiji restoration in 1868, through expansion into what has been termed the circle of Asian prosperity (1939-1945); then to defeat, foreign occupation and the need to begin again from scratch. What had happened in the immediate years following the war? How did this great nation, which had been so thoroughly broken, manage to rally its strength and rebuild itself until it became the second most powerful economic might in the world by the 1970s? And then how did it manage to gradually break out of the American nuclear hug and gradually carve for itself an honourable place among nations that was most recently crowned by the diplomatic achievement for which its current Prime Minister Fukuda will go down in history as a realistic and patriotic statesman who was prepared to grasp how Japan could benefit from changing the world? This was not to be by reverting to an aggressive imperialistic power but by becoming partners with the emerging Chinese superpower while simultaneously sustaining close alliances with the West, notably the US and Australia; building bridges of friendship with Russia, India, Korea and the countries of Southeast Asia; and strengthening its relations with the countries of the Middle East petroleum circle -- we should always remember that Japan helped clear the Suez Canal in the wake of the October 1973 war and that it performed this task at lightning speed and on terms that rivalled those offered by the former Soviet Union. Naturally, in the aftermath of defeat, Japan's foremost foreign policy priority was, per force, its relationship with the occupying power. This took as its beginning the constitution of November 1946 in accordance with which Tokyo renounced war, which provision was cemented further in a security treaty with the US in September 1951. Having accepted these terms, Japanese foreign policy retreated to the pragmatic emphasis on economic relations and Prime Minister Yoshida had little choice but to agree to the security treaty. By then, the Cold War had begun, nevertheless the treaty sparked considerable controversy in Japan, with the right clamouring for constitutional amendment in order to restore the independence and the right to an army, and the left demanding that the government revoke that treaty but remain a neutral and unarmed nation. In fact, that security treaty continues to cast a heavy shadow today, in spite of the transformation of Japanese society and national spirit with the rise of the Japanese economic dynamo. In that unfamiliar rapidly changing climate, especially since 1978 after China began its miraculous political and economic rise, the once sure hold of the ruling Liberal Party, which remained in power since after the war, began to tremble in the face of other political forces. Prime among these was the Socialist Party, although the Japanese Communist Party, too, was a formidable force, with a third of the seats in parliament and a powerful presence in the cultural and intellectual spheres. Consequently, Japan needed to cast around for new and unexplored types of relations in that era I have called in a book published in 1985 "the era of transforming the world," in reference to the years between 1949 (the victory of the Chinese Revolution) and 1973 (The Liberation of Vietnam and the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal in the October War). Following Japan's miraculous rise as an economic power, the US-Soviet bipolar order collapsed in 1991, thus giving impetus to the rightwing forces in Japan -- traditionally wary of China's growing might -- now that the Soviet Union no longer served as a counterweight in the international field. Japanese prime ministers began to pay regular visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, in the heart of Tokyo, dedicated to the spirits of soldiers and others who had died fighting for the Emperor, including those who had fought in the armies that had crushed Korea and Northern and Central China before and during the Second World War and who would later be condemned as criminals of war. The diplomatic crisis these visits precipitated between Japan and China and Korea reached its peak under the premiership of Koizumi whose fanfare in staging these provocative visits contributed to his downfall in the summer of 2006. After the age of the slick but provocative Koizumi came Shinzo Abe, a centrist. And he was succeeded by Fukuda a few months ago. This latter, together with his eminent speaker of parliament Yonei Kono, realised that the moment had come for Japan to distance itself from its pro-US strategy and to embark on a path that would lead to the recovery of Tokyo's sovereign will and the proclamation of a foreign policy of a new order. The inaugural moment for this came with the visit by Chinese President Jintao to Japan in May, during which the two major powers announced their determination to consign their differences to the past and forge a new path forward, together, beneath the banner of a strategic and mutually beneficial cooperation. Their partnership will naturally be of pivotal importance to Asia, but it will also be a crucial step forward towards the formation of a new multi-polar world order.
