Japanese ODA to China: the enabler of FDI

Abstract

“The Japanese official development assistance (ODA) to China was linked with the needs of Japanese foreign direct investments in China?”. As a start, we can say for sure that Japanese ODA played a fundamental role in the process of development of modern China, from the resolution of infrastructure bottlenecks to the development of human resources and protection of the environment; as a consequence, Japanese ODA prepared the way to Japanese foreign investments in China. Japan’s ODA brought significant changes to the Chinese economy, which became able to attract FDI also thanks to the peculiarities of Japanese ODA interventions. This thesis starts with a description of ODA in general, and continues with the examination of the Japanese ODA system. Afterwards, there is an analysis of data concerning ODA and FDI from Japan and other countries toward China, in order to see the differences between Japan and other countries and institutions foreign investments, and observe how Japanese ODA produced the effect of attracting FDI from foreign countries included Japan itself. In the second part of this work, I describe in detail Japanese ODA to China and its evolution during the period between 1978 and the present, and make a brief description of the evolution of Japanese FDI in China as well, with a special focus on how Japanese ODA modeled its interventions on the basis of the needs of Japanese FDI. Next, there is a case study about three Chinese seaports centered on the analysis of the evolution of Japanese investments, and in particular on the different types of investment implemented by Japan in Dalian, Shanghai and Tianjin, during the three decades (80s, 90s, and 2000s) that characterized the presence of Japanese investors in China. Finally, in the last chapter, I report some views about Japanese ODA to China from Chinese and Japanese scholars and recapitulate the findings of my work. The materials I used for this work are books and articles of specialized magazines in different languages, from authors expressing various points of view about Japan’s ODA, documents issued by international organizations, documents issued by Japanese and foreign institutions, television interviews, data from international organizations and port authorities, etc. The results of this study demonstrate that Japan’s ODA followed the necessities of the Japanese private sector in China; in particular, the partial transformation of Japanese export-oriented platforms into platforms for penetration in the Chinese internal market has been successfully completed mainly thanks to the support provided by the Japanese official development assistance projects.