Japan was once the world’s leading provider of official development assistance, with China receiving enormous support for nearly four decades.
A review of Yoshihisa Komori’s book examines why Japan’s ODA failed to produce genuine Japan-China friendship and how the Chinese Communist Party shaped public perceptions of Japanese assistance.

2020-02-24

Japan, Once the World’s Leading ODA Power: The Illusion of Aid to China and a Major Failure of Japan’s China Policy

The following is from the book review section of yesterday’s Sankei Shimbun.

Did ODA Contribute to Japan-China Friendship?

The Illusion of ODA: Japan’s Great Blunder in Its China Policy

Author: Yoshihisa Komori

In the 1990s, Japan was known as an “ODA superpower,” providing official development assistance on a scale unmatched anywhere else in the world.

China was by far the largest recipient.

Much of the transport infrastructure in China’s major coastal cities, particularly Beijing, was developed with the assistance of Japanese ODA.

Many Japanese people use Beijing’s international airport and subway system without realizing that they were developed with Japanese assistance.

Why is this so?

Given the enormous scale of Japan’s contribution, one might naturally assume that the Chinese people would be aware of it, even if many Japanese people are not.

Yet most Chinese people know virtually nothing about it.

Why?

This book answers these questions and persuasively argues that the root of the problem lies in the particular nature of China as a country controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Japan’s ODA to China began in 1979 and ended in 2018.

The termination of the program was announced at the Japan-China summit meeting in October 2018.

Many expected Chinese President Xi Jinping to express gratitude for the enormous amount of assistance that Japan had provided over four decades.

Instead, he merely stated that China “highly valued Japan’s contribution through ODA.”

That was the full extent of his acknowledgment.

China could not openly describe the assistance as reparations because, in the Japan-China Joint Communiqué establishing diplomatic relations, China had declared that it renounced its demand for war reparations.

Expressing gratitude for “reparations” would therefore have been contradictory.

In substance, however, that is precisely how the assistance was regarded.

According to the author:

“China’s perception that Japan’s ODA constituted postwar compensation was not confined to the Chinese government.
It also existed widely among the Chinese people.”

I, too, have heard several Chinese intellectuals express this view.

Regrettably, for the Japanese government, ODA to China effectively functioned as a substitute for reparations.

As the author observes, the Japanese side was driven by an almost obsessive sense of urgency that it had to provide funding whenever China requested it.

I agree.

The central question is whether Japan’s ODA to China contributed to “Japan-China friendship.”

The author’s answer is an unequivocal no.

Anti-Japanese riots, anti-Japanese campaigns, and increasingly aggressive actions around the Senkaku Islands have all moved relations in the opposite direction from friendship.

Does not the present state of Japan-China relations demonstrate the accuracy of the author’s clear-eyed realism?

Review by Toshio Watanabe
Academic Adviser, Takushoku University