Based on a Sankei Shimbun review of Yoshihisa Komori’s The ODA Illusion: A Major Failure in Japan’s China Policy, this essay examines the massive ODA Japan provided to China from 1979 to 2018. Did Japan’s aid, which supported Chinese infrastructure such as Beijing’s international airport and subway system, contribute to Japan–China friendship? It questions the nature of Chinese Communist Party rule and the naivety of Japanese diplomacy.

April 21, 2020
In the 1990s, Japan boasted the world’s largest scale of ODA, official development assistance, and was called an “ODA superpower.”
China was overwhelmingly the main recipient.
There are probably quite a few Japanese people who use Beijing’s international airport and subway, but they probably do not know that these were built with Japan’s ODA.
This is a republication of a chapter I sent out on February 24 under that title.
The following is from yesterday’s book review column in the Sankei Shimbun.
Did it contribute to Japan–China friendship?
The ODA Illusion: A Major Failure in Japan’s China Policy.
Author: Yoshihisa Komori.
In the 1990s, Japan boasted the world’s largest scale of ODA, official development assistance, and was called an “ODA superpower.”
China was overwhelmingly the main recipient.
It is fair to say that the foundations of transportation infrastructure in Beijing and other major coastal cities came into being because of Japan’s ODA.
There are probably quite a few Japanese people who use Beijing’s international airport and subway, but they probably do not know that these were built with Japan’s ODA.
Why is that?
Even if Japanese people do not know, since it was such a large contribution, one would think that Chinese people could not possibly be unaware of it.
Yet they do not know it at all.
Why is that?
This book answers such questions.
Furthermore, it persuasively develops the argument that where these questions ultimately lead is to China’s peculiar nature as a country under one-party Communist Party rule.
Japan’s ODA to China began in 1979 and ended in 2018.
The declaration of its end was made at the Japan–China summit meeting in October 2018.
One might have expected President Xi Jinping to express gratitude for the huge amount of ODA provided over forty years.
Instead, he merely said that he “highly evaluates Japan’s contribution through ODA.”
Only the single word “evaluates.”
Since the basic document establishing diplomatic relations, the Japan–China Joint Communiqué, stated that China “renounces its demand for war reparations,” China cannot call it reparations.
To thank someone for reparations would be a “contradiction.”
However, in short, it was reparations.
The author says, “On the Chinese side, not only at the government level but also at the level of the people, there existed a recognition that Japan’s ODA was in fact postwar reparations.”
I myself have heard of such a “recognition” from several Chinese intellectuals.
The troubling thing is that, for the Japanese government, ODA to China was a “substitute” for reparations.
The author says that on the Japanese side there was “an almost obsessive sense of urgency that funds had to be provided in response to China’s demands no matter what.”
I think so too.
What must be asked is whether ODA to China contributed to “Japan–China friendship.”
But it apparently did not contribute at all.
Anti-Japanese riots, anti-Japanese events, and offensives over the Senkaku Islands.
The reality, he observes, is that things have moved in the direction exactly opposite to friendship.
Does not the present state of Japan–China relations prove the author’s excellent realism?
Review by Toshio Watanabe, academic adviser at Takushoku University.