No one wants to have their car destroyed in the next riot.
Posted on 10/08/2012 8:05:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
* Nissan to suspend night shifts in China car plants-Nikkei
* Toyota, Honda to cut working hours, slow line speed-Nikkei
* Report does not say how long production cuts will last
* Japan carmakers' plants operating again after China holiday (Adds Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Suzuki comments and background)
TOKYO, Oct 8 (Reuters) - Japan's Toyota Motor Corp, Nissan Motor Co and Honda Motor Co plan to slash production in China by roughly half, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday, as a territorial row between Asia's two largest economies cuts sales of Japanese cars in the world's biggest auto market.
Sales have plunged at Japanese car makers since violent protests and calls for boycotts of Japanese products broke out across China in mid-September over the Japanese government's purchase of a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea from their private owner.
Nissan will suspend the night shift at its passenger car factories in China and operate only during the day, the business daily said. Nissan has two passenger car factories in China, in Huadu and Zhengzhou, with two lines each. A Nissan spokesman declined to confirm the report.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
No one wants to have their car destroyed in the next riot.
The China threat grows each day.
I favor no side on this islands dispute.
But Japan is getting her Karma handed to them for refusing to acknowledge the atrocities their troops perpetrated on China and Korea in World War II.
The Sino_Japanese war lasted from 1937 until 1945 (When Truman ended it with the Atomic bomb), saw the infamous Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking.
During a six-week period beginning in mid-December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army murdered, raped and looted the citizens of the former Chinese capital on a scale that even the Nazis would be hard-pressed to match when they were let loose on Europe a few years later.
Although official records confirmed the death toll at Nanjing at between 250,000 and 300,000, various Japanese nationalists have continued to claim over the decades that the figure has either been widely exaggerated or fabricated for the purposes of propaganda. As recently as February of this year, the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, said he believed the massacre never happened—it would have been impossible, he reportedly said, to kill so many people in such a short timeframe.
As for outsiders to the conflict, referring to the events in Nanjing as a “massacre” is still commonly interpreted as Japan-bashing. Nanjing is a key foundation stone in the national identities of both China and Japan, and 75 years on it remains a tinderbox that could quite easily flare into a third Sino-Japanese war.
The Germans have owned up to the holocaust. The Japanese HAVE NOT. Even today, the Mayor of Tokyo refuses to acknowledge that it happened.
We are just seeing the consequence of this arrogance. How this will play out is anybody’s guess. It’s not pretty.
Let’s be fair to Japan, they are the only nation to get slapped with nuclear weapons.
This entire dispute is just Chinese grandstanding to distract their population from internal economic woes.
November 26, 1998. Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi. "Both sides believe that squarely facing the past and correctly understanding history are the important foundation for further developing relations between Japan and China. The Japanese side observes the 1972 Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China and the August 15, 1995 Statement by former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama. The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious distress and damage that Japan caused to the Chinese people through its aggression against China during a certain period in the past and expressed deep remorse for this. The Chinese side hopes that the Japanese side will learn lessons from the history and adhere to the path of peace and development. Based on this, both sides will develop long-standing relations of friendship" (Japan-China Joint Declaration On Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development)
I’ve read that the most popular and sought after car in China is the GM Buick.
They have apologized repeatedly. The unfortunate reality is that Chinese hatred is so deep that anything short of a Jonestown-style national mass suicide will be considered insincere by the Chinese. Ultimately, Japan will need its own nuclear deterrent. If Chinese hatred cannot be appeased, it must be deterred.
* I am only referring to the large-scale massacres. There were smaller-scale massacres that resulted from civil wars and battles fought between kingdoms before and after the formation of the unitary Chinese state 2000 years ago. The big ones occurred at the conclusion of the 15th Century Ming Emperor Yongle's usurpation of his nephew's throne and 19th Century Qing General Zeng Guoquan's (brother of the illustrious Zeng Guofan) military campaign against the Taiping rebels.
Ironically, it was a German businessman, John Rabe, a NSDAP member (therefore, by definition, a Nazi), who organized the Nanking Safety Zone to save Chinese civilians from the Japanese army. I suppose that puts Germany on China's good side to this day - not that it stops them from ripping off German know-how and IP...
Japanese cars have an excellent reputation for reliability in China. The problem is that cars are uniquely exposed - they are the one big ticket item routinely left on the street by their owners. In the current climate, owning a Japanese car is riskier than usual, not because everyone in the country is a vandal, but because it only takes one bloody-minded individual to inflict thousands of dollars worth of damage. It wouldn’t surprise me if Chinese government functionaries are steering clear of Japanese cars for reasons of political correctness.
Not really. The Chinese aren't unique in this, but they are whiners to the nth degree. The Jewish population was cut in half and probably 10x more Jewish civilians were deliberately massacred than the Chinese, but you'll never hear about Jews coming up with these hate-fests.
At Nanking, the Japanese were re-enacting their traditional treatment of cities (in Japan itself) that resisted and inflicted serious casualties on the besieging force. Germans did much the same at the conclusion of the siege of Tianjin (during the Boxer Rebellion):
Germany sent only a small contingent to the relief of the foreign legions in Peking, but Kaiser Wilhelm II sent his men with this command: "Bear yourselves as Huns of Attila. For a thousand years, let the Chinese tremble at the approach of a German." The German imperial troops obeyed, with so much rape, looting and murder of Chinese citizens that the American and (ironically, given the events of the next 45 years) Japanese troops had to turn their guns several times on the Germans and threaten to shoot them, to restore order.
Wilhelm and his army were motivated most immediately by the murder of the two German missionaries in Shandong Province. However, their larger motivation was that Germany had only unified in as a nation in 1871. The Germans felt that they had fallen behind European powers like the United Kingdom and France, and Germany wanted its own "place in the sun" - its own empire. Collectively, they were prepared to be utterly ruthless in pursuit of that goal.
The Battle of Tientsin would be the bloodiest of the Boxer Rebellion. In an unsettling preview of World War I, the foreign troops ran across open ground to attack the fortified Chinese positions and were simply mown down; the Chinese regulars on the city walls had Maxim guns, an early machine-gun, as well as cannon. Foreign casualties at Tientsin topped 750.
Good for them! The Japaneese have not exactly been “kind” to the Chineese over the years. (Think mass rape and murder)
That is true certainly and tragic but it ended the war. Moral of the story (Listen up terrorists) DO NOT CRASH PLANES INTO us.
The other powers in Europe were always nervous when they observed the various German states beginning to team up or coalesce.
The non-German powers had various geopolitical tools at their disposal to keep the German states at one another's throats, thus minimizing the danger to the other nations. Among these tools, IMHO, was the promotion of the conflict arising from the split of German states along Protestant and Roman Catholic lines, culminating in the 30 Years' War. Its end was not seen until the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, by which time the various German states and their peoples had been severely reduced from the war and its consequences.
Prussia was, of course, the Big Dog in the unification process. It slowly extended its consolidation to the east and the west in a patchwork manner across the north German duchies and across northern Poland and to the baltic states as well.
Prussia made the final push to unification under Bismarck and Wilhelm I with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. During the subsequent occupation of France, Wilhelm I was crowned Emperor of the second Reich at Versailles. (The first Reich was considered to be that of Otto I, in the tenth century; and we all know about the putative third one.)
The above is not to say that the new Emperor and his statesman wanted to consolidate France; far from it. But their tour de force had been both a standard for certain remaining non-Prussian states to rally around, and also a reminder that Prussia was now in the political, military, and (to a dgree) economic driver's seat, and the remaining German states were well to consider joining the Reich rather than fighting it.
The only state of the German world that didn't join in the unification was Habsburg Austria. Bismarck noted with a certain contempt the tenuous political stability of that decrepit hodgepodge of an empire, and decided he wanted nothing to do with it (subsequent to a brief war with them over certain political issues, that is).
The other nations grew alarmed at the recreation of the German Empire. But then Bismarck, that master of limited wars, passed from the scene, discarded by Wilhelm's grandson Wilhelm II. It took a couple of generations after German unification for all the conditions to be right for the War To End Civilization.
The Austrian possessions in the Balkans were the tinder, an assassin's bomb was the spark, and German munitions were half of the explosives in that catastrophe.
This can't end well. If Japan wins the island dispute, the Chinese general population is being prepared foe mass resentment. If China wins, further military adventurism is encouraged.
I saw a lot of Buicks over there. The car badges say "GM Shanghai", already acknowledging GM's future world headquarters location. :) There are also a lot of Hyundai and Volkswagen models - more of those than Japanese makes.
But the most sought-after car is the Audi A6L - in black, of course. It's kind of an official staff car for CCP bureaucrats and everybody else wants one to look like a serious player.
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