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Others held high a wide variety of handmade placards and posters. Many focused on a proposed boycott for the month of May:

The most striking image was of Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. One protester gave him a mustache to make him look like Adolph Hitler. Others went further, dehumanizing him. One placard painted a pig’s snout and ears onto his face and declared in large characters, “Death to Koizumi the pig!” But the most ominous images evoked a dead Koizumi, with tombstones bearing his name and a photo of a funeral with Koizumi’s picture at the center.

On their way to the Japanese consulate, the demonstrators smashed the windows of Japanese stores and restaurants, overturned Japanese cars and burned Japanese flags and photos, as well as placards of Koizumi. When they arrived at the consulate, they hurled eggs and pelted it with paint bombs.

Shanghai is generally seen as China’s most cosmopolitan city, an apolitical place where people from all over the world can safely do business. Yet these Shanghai youth displayed a passionate indignation toward Japan – a passion that even flared into displays of violence. And the Shanghai protest was not an isolated incident. It was the third successive weekend of protests involving tens of thousands of Chinese in cities as diverse as Canton, Shenzhen and Beijing. The current wave of anti-Japanese sentiment can be traced back to the summer of 2003 when a string of anti-Japanese incidents in Chinese cyberspace and on the Chinese street prompted a national debate on China’s Japan policy.

Why are China’s youth today so angry at Japan? The most common view expressed in the Western media is to blame the state: The Chinese government encouraged the anti-Japanese protests for both domestic and international purposes. Domestically, the Chinese Communist Party is seen as using Japan as a scapegoat to pre-empt popular criticisms of the Chinese government itself. Internationally, the party is seen as using popular anti-Japanese protests to achieve specific foreign policy goals, such as denying Japan a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council.

Such arguments tell an important part of the story. With the decline of the legitimating appeal of communist ideology following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, the Communist Party initiated a Patriotic Education Campaign in the early 1990s to bolster its nationalist credentials. There is no question that the party has deployed its educational and propaganda systems to inculcate anti-Japanese views. But there is no doubt either that the Chinese state has the capability to clamp down on popular nationalists. The People’s Armed Police, for instance, could have stepped in to prevent protesters from hurling eggs and rocks at the Japanese consulate in Shanghai.

But it would be a mistake to attribute complete control over Chinese nationalism today to the Communist Party. The genie is now out of the bottle. With the emergence of the Internet, cellphones and text messaging, popular nationalists in China are increasingly able to act independently of the state. When any regime – even a dictatorship – resorts to force in the short term, it usually pays a price in terms of its legitimacy in the long term.

China is not a democracy, but “Chinese popular opinion” is not an oxymoron. Because anti-Japanese sentiment is widespread in China today, had the Chinese state deployed force to suppress the protesters, its legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people would have been seriously undermined. Few regimes last long by force alone; stable regimes require the consent of the governed.

The real concern, in other words, may not be the party’s ability to manipulate popular nationalism, but its inability to fully control it.

If Chinese nationalism is not simply a tool of the state, what are its popular and emotional origins? While education and propaganda are partly to blame, anti-Japanese sentiment in China today has deeper roots in shifting Chinese understandings of their past and the meaning of being Chinese at the dawn of the 21St century.

After a quarter century of unprecedented economic growth, Chinese today no longer fear Japan, but a long suppressed anger at Japan has resurfaced. The Maoist “victor narrative,” about heroic Chinese victories over Western and Japanese imperialism from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, has been challenged since the mid-1990s by a new “victim narrative” about Chinese suffering during the “Century of Humiliation.” This traumatic re-encounter with long suppressed suffering has understandably generated anger.

This anger has been directed primarily at Japan.

Why? To most Chinese, the Japanese are the paradigmatic “devils” – not just because of the brutality of the Japanese invasion of China and the sheer numbers of Chinese killed by Japanese troops but also because of an ethical anger with earlier origins. The perceived injustice of “little brother” Japan’s impertinent behavior toward “big brother” China – starting with China’s loss in the Sino-Japanese Jiawu War and the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, and running through the insulting “21 Demands” of 1915 and on to World War II atrocities like the “Rape of Nanking” – gives anti-Japanese anger in China both “higher” ethical and “lower” visceral dimensions. It is the complexity and depth of this anger that sustains anti-Japanese sentiment in China today and sets it apart from more fleeting anti-American and other anti-foreign sentiments.

It will require wise leadership in both Beijing and Tokyo to avoid Sino-Japanese conflict. Long suppressed under Mao, the wound of atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre remains too raw, the perceived assault on Chinese pride too acute for many Chinese nationalists to seriously entertain any Japanese apology.

Many Japanese, for their part, are increasingly angered by what they perceive to be incessant Japan-bashing in China injurious to Japanese national pride. Unfortunately, because so much of Sino-Japanese relations implicates identity politics – about what it means to be “Chinese” or “Japanese” today – the relationship is likely to remain volatile for the foreseeable future.

Peter Hays Gries is a CU-Boulder assistant professor of political science and author of “China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy.”