Playing the victim: How China weaponizes history to escape judgment in the present

One of China’s most durable defenses against criticism is not an explanation of its present conduct but a rewritten account of the past.

When Beijing faces scrutiny over military expansion, territorial pressure or political repression, it can shift the argument from what China is doing now to what foreign powers did decades or centuries earlier. Japan becomes the aggressor, China becomes the victim, and the present dispute is recast as another chapter in an unfinished struggle against humiliation.

That method matters far beyond East Asia. Milwaukee has repeatedly seen how governments and political movements can turn history, ethnicity, and inherited identity into tests of loyalty. A city shaped by immigration cannot treat foreign propaganda as remote when those narratives can influence how Asian American communities are viewed, how international conflicts are reported, and how public suspicion is assigned at home.

The Chinese Communist Party built much of its modern legitimacy around a national story in which it rescued China from invasion, partition, and subordination. That emphasis grew more important after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown weakened the party’s claim to represent revolutionary progress.

The government’s Patriotic Education Campaign, formally expanded in the 1990s, placed national humiliation, resistance to foreign aggression, and Communist restoration at the center of civic instruction. The party increasingly presented itself not simply as China’s government but as the guardian of the Chinese nation.

That identification created a powerful political shield. Criticism of Communist Party policy could be characterized as hostility toward China itself. Disputes over borders, trade, human rights, or military conduct could be folded into a longer story of foreign efforts to contain or weaken the country.

The state did not need to prove that every contemporary opponent repeated the actions of earlier imperial powers. It needed only to make the association familiar.

The resulting history is selective by design. Official memory gives sustained attention to foreign invasions, unequal treaties, and Japanese atrocities – all of which were real and consequential.

It permits far less open examination of disasters caused by the Communist state. The Great Leap Forward produced mass famine from 1959 through 1961, while the Cultural Revolution subjected millions to persecution, displacement, and political violence from 1966 through 1976.

Those catastrophes complicate a national narrative in which China’s suffering came primarily from outsiders and the party consistently acted as its protector.

Japan is especially useful within this framework because its imperial record supplies genuine crimes that can be extended into the present. Beijing’s revived accusation of Japanese “new militarism” echoes an older ideological category associated with the Comintern’s 1932 analysis of Japan.

It does more than dispute current defense policy. It implies that modern Japan remains politically continuous with the empire that invaded China and devastated much of Asia.

Once that premise is accepted, Japan can never fully leave the defendant’s chair. Any military expansion can be portrayed as renewed aggression, while resistance to that label can be treated as evidence that Japan has failed to confront its past. Historical responsibility becomes a permanent and political disqualification.

China’s use of the postwar order follows the same pattern. Beijing can invoke obsolete “enemy state” language in the U.N. Charter to suggest that Japan still occupies a uniquely suspect legal category.

Yet China has rejected international legal findings when they constrain its own territorial claims, most notably the 2016 arbitration ruling that found no legal basis for China’s sweeping claims in the South China Sea.

The principle is selective enforcement: historical rules remain useful when they weaken an adversary, but become illegitimate when they limit Chinese power.

That strategy reaches beyond Japan, but the evidence should be handled carefully. China’s claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea rely heavily on historical records, sovereignty narratives, and accusations of foreign interference.

Those claims present Chinese pressure as restoration rather than expansion. Other disputes, including border tensions with India or past conflict with Vietnam, have their own histories and should not be collapsed into one identical script. But the recurring danger is precise: a state can use chosen history to make present coercion look defensive before the facts are judged.

Milwaukee has reason to recognize that method. During World War I, German Americans in Wisconsin faced suspicion, intimidation, and pressure to prove loyalty because ancestry was treated as a political warning sign.

German-language instruction declined, German newspapers and civic institutions came under pressure, and public hostility reached into daily life. Milwaukee, then one of the nation’s most German American cities, understood how international war could become a domestic test of identity and belonging.

Wisconsin later gave the country another example of how accusations alone could be used as a political weapon. U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, built national power in the early 1950s by claiming communist infiltration inside the federal government.

His method placed people and institutions under suspicion first, then forced them to defend themselves inside a framework where denial could be treated as evasive. The Senate censured McCarthy in 1954, but the pattern outlived him, as seen in Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Define the accused before evidence is weighed, then make the accusation itself the center of public life.

That is why China’s history war is not remote from Milwaukee. Foreign narratives do not stay inside foreign ministries. They travel through news coverage, schools, social media, immigrant communities, and local political debate.

Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans and other Asian diaspora communities in Milwaukee should not be treated as representatives of governments they do not control, just as German Americans should not have been treated as suspect citizens because of a war in Europe.

A responsible response requires two judgments at once. Japan’s wartime aggression and colonial violence must remain part of the historical record. China’s own state violence, coercive policies and territorial pressure must be judged with equal seriousness. One history cannot erase the other.

The danger is not remembrance. It is selective remembrance used to assign permanent innocence to one state and permanent guilt to another. History should clarify the present, not excuse it — in East Asia, in Washington and in Milwaukee, when public narratives again turn ancestry into suspicion.