Japan’s Communist Party Can’t Quit Its China Grudge

The Japanese Communist Party occupies one of the strangest positions on China anywhere on the international left. It is one of the few established parties in Japan that consistently opposes remilitarization, rejects a U.S.-Japan war over Taiwan, and warns against using the “China threat” to justify a regional arms race. Yet the same party has spent years insisting that the Communist Party of China has wandered so far from socialism that it is no longer worthy of the name.

That contradiction matters because Japan is not an outside observer of East Asian power politics. It is the former imperial power that invaded China, colonized Korea, and today hosts the largest concentration of U.S. military power in the region. A communist party operating inside Japan should therefore be unusually careful not to reproduce the assumptions of the Japanese security establishment while presenting them in left-wing language.

The JCP’s own 2026 policy on Japan-China relations shows the tension clearly. The party says it wants active diplomacy, opposes a military-versus-military spiral, and criticizes Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Taiwan rhetoric for worsening relations with Beijing. Those are serious and useful positions. But they sit beside a much older ideological judgment that treats China primarily through the vocabulary of “hegemonism,” territorial pressure, and democratic failure.

A communist party that will not call China socialist

At its 2020 congress, the JCP formally removed China from the category of countries engaged in a “new quest for socialism.” Its leadership cited China’s nuclear policy, conduct in the East and South China Seas, disputes at international conferences, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang. The party went further: in its congress report, it argued that the Chinese leadership’s conduct was incompatible with socialist principles and declared that the CPC was “not deserved to be called a communist party.”

The remarkable part is not that Japanese communists criticize China. Communist parties should be able to criticize one another. The remarkable part is the method the JCP uses to decide what counts as socialism. In the report explaining its program revision, the party explicitly centered its judgment on China’s foreign-policy behavior and the perceived sincerity of its leadership rather than on a sustained analysis of property relations, class power, planning, accumulation, labor, or the structure of the Chinese state.

That is a strange inversion for a Marxist party. Whether contemporary China is socialist, market socialist, transitional, or something more contradictory is a real debate. But a serious answer cannot be reached simply by assembling a list of diplomatic disputes and then using them as a test of whether a society has crossed out of socialism.

The old feud behind the modern theory

There is a historical reason for the JCP’s suspicion. Relations between the Japanese and Chinese communist parties collapsed in the 1960s amid the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution. Beijing tried to pressure the JCP over revolutionary strategy and supported forces hostile to the Japanese party. The rupture lasted for roughly three decades.

That history is not invented. A scholarly study of the 1966–1998 split describes Chinese efforts to splinter the Japanese party and the long negotiations that eventually produced reconciliation. When relations were normalized in 1998, the Chinese side acknowledged conduct inconsistent with non-interference, while the JCP treated the historical dispute as substantially resolved.

The problem is that a legitimate defense of party independence hardened into a worldview. The JCP’s modern China line repeatedly reaches back to Mao-era interference as the historical template through which later disagreements are understood. A conflict from 1966 becomes the emotional and theoretical backdrop for judging a China transformed by reform, industrialization, global integration, poverty reduction, technological development, and a vastly different international environment.

The contradiction is visible in 2026

The JCP today opposes Japanese participation in a war over Taiwan and rejects attempts to build an exclusionary anti-China security bloc. Its East Asia peace proposal says Japan and the United States should not militarily intervene in Taiwan and warns that hawkish “Taiwan crisis” rhetoric can itself intensify the danger of war. This is precisely the kind of position the Japanese left should defend.

But the party simultaneously treats Chinese power as though it must constantly prove its innocence to standards largely set by the liberal international order. On the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, for example, the JCP largely accepts the Japanese state’s territorial framework while condemning Chinese pressure as hegemonic. The party calls for negotiation, which is welcome, but its baseline remains much closer to Tokyo’s understanding of the dispute than its revolutionary history might lead an outsider to expect.

That tension becomes harder to ignore as Japan itself expands military spending, deepens integration with the United States, and debates a more direct role in a Taiwan conflict. The relevant question for Japanese communists is not whether every Chinese action deserves endorsement. It is whether China should be analyzed principally as an independent socialist-led power confronting a U.S.-centered military architecture, or principally as another threatening great power whose behavior must be disciplined by that architecture’s assumptions.

Criticism without campism

Rejecting the JCP’s China line does not require pretending Beijing never makes mistakes. It does not require defending every policy in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, the South China Sea, or across the Taiwan Strait. Internationalism is not obedience, and solidarity is not the suspension of criticism.

But criticism should be proportionate, materialist, and historically situated. China is governed by a communist party, retains extensive state ownership in strategic sectors, uses national planning on a scale unknown in contemporary capitalist states, and has pursued a development model that cannot be reduced to neoliberal capitalism with a red flag attached. Those realities deserve analysis before a Japanese communist party declares that the Chinese party is effectively disqualified from communism.

The JCP itself demonstrates that another approach is possible. Its opposition to Japanese militarism, its insistence on diplomacy, its criticism of anti-Chinese xenophobia, and its refusal to support U.S.-Japanese intervention over Taiwan all point toward a more coherent position. The missing step is to stop treating an old inter-party wound as a permanent theory of China.

Japan’s communists should escape the 1960s

The JCP was right to defend its organizational independence when Mao-era China interfered in its affairs. No communist party owes another obedience. But independence should mean the freedom to analyze reality as it exists now, not the obligation to preserve a sixty-year-old grievance as political doctrine.

For a party operating in a country that once invaded China and is now central to Washington’s military strategy in East Asia, the burden should be especially high before adopting the language of Chinese “hegemonism” as a defining framework. Japan’s communists should be among the sharpest critics of their own state’s militarism and of U.S. power in the region. They should also be capable of debating China as socialists rather than judging it from the inherited assumptions of Tokyo’s foreign-policy establishment.

The JCP’s best principle is its insistence on sovereign independence. It should apply that principle to its own analysis. Independent Marxism means neither following Beijing nor following Washington. It means looking clearly at class, state power, history, development and imperialism — and refusing to let yesterday’s factional war decide today’s politics.

Photo: 赤羽霧 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.