Reply #3: Yet again.

[Igel]

Are the Japanese abject and sufficiently engaged in self-abasement to acknowledge Middle Kingdom supremacy? Is Chinese official honor and the CP's political ends met?

I'd guess not. It'll get damned by faint praise in the Chinese media, the message clear to the Chinese readership--not sincere, not intended, but we have scored a partial victory. We'll let in pass, in our superior humility, since the world has noted this.

It'll get great praise in the Western media ... as did the last first, groundbreaking Japanese apology, the one before that, and the one before that ... until China points out that it's not sufficient for some reason. Any possible insufficiencies will be noted, however slight or probably accidental over the next few months; they will, in the true spirit of ill will pervading political discourse, eventually be taken as intentional insufficiencies. The apology will be largely forgotten, and nobody will have ever said it was really an apology, no matter what text databases say.

Making its way into academia, the apology will be deconstructed, to show that actually there are interstices of meaning that may be interpreted as denying the surface message, and therefore objectively must be interpreted as denying the surface message; silence of some subject that must mean approval of assorted atrocities, thus making the overt apology into not just a non-apology, but an actual provocation.

And the "demands for apology as political tool" will be honed, oiled, and set aside for another use another day; maybe by China, maybe by somebody else.