Aiding regional instability? The geopolitical paradox of Japanese development assistance to China

Abstract

During the past decade, Japan established itself as the largest bilateral donor of development aid in the world, with more of it directed toward projects in China than any other recipient. Japan sees its aid flows to China as maintaining economic stability in East Asia, particularly as China's raw material and energy resources are articulated into regional markets. In this article, I argue that Japan's aid to China may unintentionally diminish Japan's and the East Asian region's long‐term security for two reasons. First, similar to other nations receiving such assistance, this aid may allow China to reallocate scarce capital to military modernisation. Such military modernisation may enable China to both better suppress internal dissent and carry out a more aggressive foreign policy. Second, this aid does not address the fundamental structural aspects of China's present instability. Long‐term structural instability has many sources, but the two discussed here are socio‐economic inequality (both interregional and intraregional), and sustainable production and environmental problems. Taken together these have important regional and geopolitical implications and repercussions. This article fills a gap in the existing literature on East Asian geopolitics. Namely, that by attending only to relatively short‐term corporate and perceived state interests of China and Japan, Japanese aid to China does little to ameliorate and potentially exacerbates long‐term structural social and environmental problems for China's vast majority living in rural hinterlands. The potential for internal turmoil springing from this uneven and unsustainable development inside China is the real basis for China's ‘threat’ to East Asian security. Thus what appears to make good development and geopolitical sense at first look, Japan's current aid regime with China, paradoxically may actually be the worst path to follow.

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