The article examines the response of the Chinese government to anti-Japanese protests and demonstrations. "It's a scary country," Japan's trade minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, said of China this week, following demonstrations in several Chinese cities by thousands of protesters, some of whom smashed the windows of Japanese shops and restaurants and threw stones at Japanese diplomatic buildings. The protests first turned violent in the south-western city of Chengdu on April 2nd, and erupted with particular fury in Beijing a week later. They were the biggest to take place in China since tens of thousands took to the streets across the country in 1999 in response to the bombing of China's Belgrade embassy by American aircraft during the Kosovo war. In a country where public protest is usually quickly suppressed, anti-Japanese sentiment has proved hard for the authorities to handle. The authorities' dilemma is reflected in their handling of these protests, which began as a show of opposition (on the grounds that Japan has failed to show sufficient contrition for its wartime atrocities) to Japan's campaign for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. China's government worries that if it is seen as too weak towards Japan, or cracks down too hard, the protesters could turn against the party. In the last century, pro-democracy unrest in China was often closely linked with patriotic demonstrations. Many participants in the recent protests have been university students, a group kept under particularly close watch by the authorities since the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The nationalist genie, once unbottled, could prove hard for China to restrain.