The Chinese government has figured out a truly contemporary way to deliver anti-Japanese propaganda to the already frighteningly nationalist cohort of teenage Chinese men. It's commissioned a massively-multiplayer online game in which valiant, Chinese net-heads can vanquish fiendish Japanese soldiers.

You might ask how this is different from any number of American and European war-based videogames that pit the Allies against the Axis. Well, for a start, they weren't government sponsored. Also, in most of them, you can play either side, making them, in a sense, neutral. According to an article in the UK's Guardian, this new, Chinese game won't work like that:

"Anti-Japan War Online" is being sponsored by the Communist Youth League, the power base of president Hu Jintao, in order to foster greater patriotism among the fast-growing internet game community. Players choose from a range of 17 Chinese characters - peasant, worker, student, tailor - that they must develop from childhood into strong figures worthy of joining the communist guerrilla forces. Advanced players are promoted to the Eighth Route Army - the militia that served under General Zhu De in a series of successful raids on depots and supply convoys behind enemy lines in the north of China during the second world war. Players are not allowed to take the part of Japanese soldiers.

To distinguish the two sides, developers said they had made the appearance of Japanese soldiers more ugly, but they have scaled down the battle scenes so that the fighting is not excessively bloodthirsty.

From: China gets gung-ho with new war against Japan - but only online, by Jonathan Watts, Guardian, September 2, 2005

So the Japanese icons are more ugly so the two sides can be told apart. That makes sense. After all, you'd never be able to accomplish the same thing with color or uniform styles or simple, well-designed graphics. And, in fact, the very next line makes it clear that it's more than just an accident of game design that the Japanese areugly:

"Our developers hate Japan, so they want to make the game very provocative, but the team leaders have tried to tone down the violence," said the project manager, Liu Junfeng of PowerNet Technology, a Shenzhen-based gaming company.

Right, that cuts to the chase. Now, I remember gleefully blasting away at digital Nazis in the early nineties game “Wolfenstein 3D”, the precursor to Doom, Quake, Half Life, and every other first-person shooter game. But I don't remember that game being plugged into any concerted, national propaganda campaign to encourage anti-German sentiment. God knows the orcs in Warcraft are butt-ugly, but, since they don't actually exist, I don't worry about my future children encountering them in real life and having to cut through the resultant bigotry. Oh well. Nice of the management to tone down the violence.

So let's cut to the chase. The party, which is essentially the government, has sponsored a racist, anti-Japanese videogame designed by people who “hate Japan”, with the likely result that it will inculcate among players the feeling that Japanese are inhuman monsters to be mown down. That makes good sense. If you're breeding a generation for war. In the sponsors' own words:

"Anti-Japan War Online is a patriotic online game that is both interesting and instructive to young players," the youth league's Chen Xiao said. "We will play close attention to the authenticity of historical facts in the game."

Instructive. No doubt.