Shinzo Abe – Japan’s longest-serving prime minister who was assassinated on Friday – was best known for three things: His tough anti-Chinese stance; his efforts to beef up Japan’s military and Abenomics.

The first secured him the ire of Beijing which he wore as a badge of honour. Of course, as soon as the news of the shooting crossed the East China Sea, the official Chinese line was shock, horror and dismay. But on social media Chinese nationalists were busy expressing their glee. One of the reasons for the Chinese dislike of Abe was his skewed view of history and pro-defense policies. On the former, Abe – in common with many other Japanese politicians – denied, ignored or underplayed his country’s atrocities during World War II. The Chinese retain bitter memories of the Japanese occupation of most of their country in the 1930s and during World War Two. They welcomed the constitutional post-war curbs on the Japanese defense forces which banned the Japanese from using war “as a means of settling disputes.”

Abe, a staunch nationalist, wanted to re-write the constitution and increase defense spending from one to two percent of the GDP.  This policy has the support of Western governments who regard the restrictions on the world’s third largest economy as a post-war anomaly. Defense spending is a major issue in the current election.

Shinzo Abe was one of the many world leaders who lent their name to an economic theory. Abenomics combined monetary easing by the central bank with increased government spending and structural reform. Its purpose was to end decades of economic stagnation. Abenomics had some success but not as much as Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party hoped. Like all politicians, Shinzo Abe enjoyed successes and suffered failures. But his greatest achievement was to be the tough man of Japanese politics at a time when the Japanese required a stiff political backbone.

Vladimir Putin was blunt: We have just begun to fight, he told Russian parliamentary leaders this week. He then went on to blame the “collaborative West” for starting the war in Ukraine. It was the result, he claimed of a 2014 Western-supported military coup which ousted a pro-Russian government and launched a “genocide” in the Donbas Region.

In the meantime, reports are emerging of tens of thousands of Donbas-based Ukrainians “disappearing.” Many of them are pro-Ukrainian journalists, academics, lawyers, politicians and government officials who have either vanished altogether or whose bodies have been discovered in vacant lots or outside their homes. Others are ordinary citizens who have been evacuated from the Ukrainian cities demolished by Russian artillery. Many of them are bussed to the Russian border where their documents are confiscated and they are dispatched for settlement in different parts of Russia. The saddest cases are the children who are placed in foster care or sent off for adoption without any attempt at contact with their Ukrainian families.

Of course, these tactics are a common thread in Russian history. In 1828, The Russian Empire forced the resettlement of Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and sowed the seeds of conflict with Azerbaijan. During the Soviet years, the Siberian gulags were used as much as resettlement camps as prisons. In the war years, 400,000 Poles were sent East along with hundreds of thousands of dissident Lithuanians, Tatars, Finns, Estonians, Latvians and many more. According to files unearthed by researchers, by 1950, 2,572,829 people had been “resettled” by Soviet authorities. In modern times, the disappearance of Chechens, was condemned by Human Rights Watch as a crime against humanity. So, nothing new here.

Meanwhile, in the Indonesian resort of Bali, the Russians have come under a nearly-united attack by G20 foreign ministers meeting there. The four hold-outs are China, host country Indonesia, South Africa and India. They don’t side completely with Russia, but they argue the West should accept some of the responsibility for failing to treat post- Cold War Moscow as a serious global player and by expanding NATO.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Bali to discount those arguments and ensure that sanctions are adhered to and to try and find a work-around to the current world food shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His key meeting will be with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. So far the Chinese have pointedly failed to match their words of support for Russia with action. There are no signs of Beijing evading sanctions or supplying Putin with military hardware. Blinken will seek reassurances that China’s hands-off approach will continue.

To encourage the Chinese, Blinken is expected to offer a summit between President Biden and Xi Jinping and the possibility of the lifting of some US tariffs on Chinese products. The latter move would have the added benefit of easing inflation in America. Blinken, by the way, has pointedly refused to meet with Russian summit attendee Sergei Lavrov who has dismissed the US Secretary of State’s attacks as “frenzied criticism.”

While Blinken and Wang Yi prepared to meet in Bali, the heads of America’s FBI and Britain’s FBI, held an unprecedented joint press conference in London to warn Western businesses against Chinese perfidy. FBI director Chris Wray cautioned: “When you deal with a Chinese company know that you are also dealing with their silent partner the Chinese government and its Ministry of State Security (MSS).” The Chinese government, he added, “poses a more serious threat to Western businesses than many realise.”

MI5’s David McCallum, said: “the Chinese Communist Party is interested in our democratic, media and legal systems. Not, sadly, to emulate them, but to use them for its own gain.” The two men also said that the MSS was trying to interfere in congressional elections in New York’s tenth congressional district where a Yang Xiong, a Tiananmen Square protester, is standing as a Democratic Party candidate.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopedia of the War” and the recently published “America Made in Britain". He has a weekly podcast, Transatlantic Riff.