Former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui has long rankled Beijing with his assertions that the self-ruling island is an independent country.
Xue Yi is arrested at Narita Airport.
On June 7th, the 84-year-old Lee paid a visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to pay respects to his brother, Lee Teng-chin, who is enshrined at Yasukuni along with 2.5 million of Japan’s war dead, including 14 Class-A war criminals. In 1945, when Taiwan was a colony of Japan, Lee Teng-chin was killed in the Philippines fighting for the Japanese navy. This was Lee Teng-hui’s third visit to Japan since he left office in 2000, but his first to the war shrine. Speaking in Japanese at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, Lee blamed the media for playing up what he called a “private visit.” Chinese media provided considerable coverage and commentary on the visit to the war shrine by “the scum of the nation.” When Xue Yi, a 34-year-old Chinese national living in Japan, hurled plastic bottles at Lee at Tokyo’s Narita Airport on June 9th as Lee was to board a flight back to Taiwan, he, too, was hurled into the Chinese media spotlight. Internet bulletin boards soon overflowed with praise for Xue, calling him a “hero” who embodied the “true spirit of China” by “striking Devil Lee and setting an example for China’s youth.” And while Xue was in police custody after the incident, roughly 20 protestors, with prior permission from the Chinese government, demonstrated in front of the Japanese embassy in Beijing demanding his release. After paying a fine of 200,000 yen (US$1688.19), Xue was released on June 20th. In an interview with the International Herald Leader, a publication run by China’s official Xinhua News Agency, the software engineer said he had felt compelled to do what he did because “otherwise I would not know how to face myself.” The interview also revealed that Xue had participated in anti-Japanese activities in China before he moved to Japan two years ago. Despite the initial support for Xue’s actions, once it became known that Xue had earlier quit his job in China for a better offer in Japan, press coverage began to wane and the tide in Chinese cyberspace turned against him. The “hero” became a “phony patriot” who “tricked the true patriots” and was “a million times worse than traitor Lee Teng-hui.” A question was pointedly raised as to why someone with Xue’s expertise would leave the motherland to seek a better life in a land that he claims to loathe.
