The Chinese government has now ordered the public to cool it ? ?Do not take part in protest activities that have not been approved,? said foreign minister Li Zhaoxing ? but we all know that the violent anti-Japanese protests that swept China in the past few weeks were tacitly approved, at least at the start.

Perhaps, the assaults on individual Japanese people and private businesses were freelance actions not sanctioned by the authorities, but the mob that smashed the windows of the Japanese embassy in Beijing while the police looked on, like the later attacks on the Japanese ambassador?s residence and the Japanese consulate in Shanghai, could not have happened without the regime?s approval.

The mobs roaming Chinese cities looked genuinely angry, and neither the Chinese nor the Japanese government has bent over backward to calm the passions. Japanese foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, made no apology for the new textbooks that refuse to use the word ?invasion? to describe Japan?s 1937-1945 invasion of China, and refer to the Nanking massacre, in which upto 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops, as an ?incident?. Machimura said that he was ?extremely concerned about violence toward embassy activities and also toward Japanese people in China.?

Equally guilty

China?s foreign minister retorted that ?The Chinese government has never done anything for which it has to apologise to the Japanese people?. The two men didn?t actually beat their chests and roar at each other, but you don?t need a field guide to recognize primate alpha males in action.

Both governments are at fault ? but it is the ease with which Beijing can rouse popular anger against Japan that is truly alarming. It will be hard for the regime to resist using this device again whenever it needs to deflect public anger away from its own failings. Nor can we be confident that a democratic China would be immune to this kind of manipulation by politicians using nationalist rhetoric.

China will become a democratic country sooner or later, but that will not banish the ultra-nationalist virus. Indeed, history teaches that rapid democratization is often accompanied by a temporary upsurge in aggressive nationalism.

Fatal attraction

There is unfortunately a logic to this. Dictatorships rarely bequeath well-developed civil societies to their successors, so how does the new democratic government maintain social cohesion and mass consent for its policies? The solution is to play on the crudest fear and hatred of foreigners and their evil ways: if you need to unite a community, give it an enemy.

It doesn?t have to be that way. Almost all democratic revolutions of the past 20 years have managed to avoid this trap. But then, most of them had a disciplined leadership with genuine support and an explicit commitment to non-violence. A ?guided? transition to democracy that is directed from above and seeks to preserve the leading position of the Communist Party, which is much more likely to be the way that democracy eventually comes to China, would not find it easy to forego the useful political tool of rabid nationalism.

Tokyo has been slow in its response to the outburst of anti-Japanese nationalism in China. It has had a policy of downplaying Japan?s guilt for the sufferings of other Asians during World War II to placate the hard-right element in Japanese politics. But mainstream Japanese politicians do not stand to gain by portraying China as an enemy.

It may sound strange to describe the people who rule China as either ?mainstream? or ?politicians?, but that is what they want to become. Portraying Japan as an enemy, unfortunately, does have its attractions.