What does Harry Potter have to do with East Asian geopolitics? On Jan. 1, Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom, penned an op-ed for The Telegraph in which he tied Japan to Voldemort, the villain in the “Harry Potter” series. He criticized Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which is controversial because it memorializes war criminals alongside Japan’s war dead.

“If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan,” Liu wrote, “the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of that nation’s soul … Regrettably, what Abe did has raised the spectre of militarism rising again in Japan.”

Not to be outdone, Japan’s ambassador to the U.K., Keiichi Hayashi, responded on Jan. 5 with a piece titled “China risks becoming Asia’s Voldemort,” calling attention to China’s rapidly increasing military capabilities and escalation of territorial disputes. Why are top diplomats from the world’s second- and third-largest economies calling each other Voldemort?

Public opinion polls in China and Japan reveal a striking degree of hostility between the two countries. In a recent WIN/Gallup International poll, about 40 percent of Japanese said China was the country that posed the “greatest threat to peace in the world today.” In the same poll, 30 percent of Chinese answered that Japan was the greatest threat, and another 50 percent named the United States, Japan’s only formal ally. Many analogies have been drawn between current geopolitical conditions in East Asia and historical episodes that ended in catastrophe. Abe came under criticism at the Davos World Economic Forum in January for comparing China’s and Japan’s predicament to that of Germany and the U.K. in 1914, when close economic ties could not prevent the outbreak of World War I. The Chinese government and press favor a different analogy, seeing echoes of Japan’s World War II militarism in the statements and actions of Japanese leaders.

A more apt historical analogy, however, might be to mid-19th-century France and Prussia. At the time, France was a waning power, and Prussia was rising. France had been the aggressor in the most recent major conflict, the Napoleonic Wars. Despite his country’s decline, Napoleon III sought to reinvigorate his countrymen by invoking symbols of bygone glory — espousing popular sovereignty and nationalism; emphasizing the connection to his more famous uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte; and establishing the second French Empire. In turn, Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck sought to take advantage of the situation by portraying Napoleon III as the principal threat to regional stability, diplomatically isolating France.