Gordon Chang

Oh, well, thank you so much, Mike.

I think Xi Jinping is upset.

You know, he has pushed the Japanese really, really hard and the Japanese are now pushing back.

You got to remember that both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, the first two leaders of the People's Republic, had very cordial and warm relations with Japan.

It was only when you started with Jiang Zemin, who was a weak leader, and following two leaders, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, that you have these real problems with Tokyo, because they're trying to create an enemy to rally the Chinese people.

And right now, the Japanese have had enough of it.

So they said, look, we're not saying sorry anymore.

We're just going full bore and we're going to protect our country.

So that's a really important change in the mentality.

And you can see it throughout Tokyo's establishment, whether left or right.

If you go back to November 7th, when Prime Minister Takeuchi answered that question on the floor of the Diet, and that enraged China, and she did not back down.

And she took an ailing Liberal Democratic Party, which was having troubles across the board, and she won an historic victory in February because she stood up to the Chinese.

And now you're seeing Japan do things which would be inconceivable a year or two ago.

That's a really important sea change, and the Chinese, I think, have just gone too far.

They were able to get their way with Japan for decades, and now that's over, because I think that essentially the Japanese political establishment believes that they've got to defend their country.

And they've got a willing ally in the United States and friends across the region.

So all of this Chinese propaganda since November 7th has really fallen flat, not only in Japan, but across East Asia.

That's a great question.

And normally you would think that if the Chinese were supple and flexible, which they have been in the past, that they would change their posture, but they haven't.

And so we have seen unyielding hostility on the part of Beijing, even though it's playing very poorly across the region.