Reassuring and Unnerving Japan } 709
early 1992 southern tour. Japan’s economy, on the other hand, was sliding into
what would prove to be a very long period of stagnation. China was in an
increasingly advantageous position vis-à-vis Japan.^5
By the early 1990s, Japan was pushing to become a “normal nation” that
could play a greater political and perhaps even military role in East Asia.
Japan’s earlier post-6-4 effort to serve as a bridge between China and the
West, along with Japan’s large ODA to China, had been part of Tokyo’s effort
to play an expanded regional role. China responded with increased empha-
sis on the history issue. In effect, Beijing was saying that Japan lacked the
moral qualifications to play a major political, much less military, role in Asia.
China’s Japan hands now concluded that Japan’s refusal to recognize the great
crimes it had committed against the peoples of Asia during the 1894–1945
period was proof of Japan’s moral incapacity. Japan’s ambition was to become
the hegemon of East Asia as the United States declined. But a rearmed Japan
would pose a threat to China and other Asian countries. Japanese hegemony
of East Asia would also deny China its rightful status in the world. Japan was
also trying to lock China into a low-value, low-technology, labor-intensive
niche in the emerging transnational production networks that were rapidly
transforming the Asian and global economies, or so China’s critics of Japan
concluded. If Japan succeeded in these efforts, China’s role in East Asia would
be constrained. A top-level policy decision premised on such ideas resulted
in a new approach toward Tokyo: China would pressure Japan to abandon
its objectionable policies. PRC leaders also calculated that this new, tougher
approach to Japan would win popular support from the Chinese people. Stress
on the history issue was a key instrument of this new, assertive approach.^6
One of China’s early decisions regarding Japan that may have been among
the most consequential was a decision not to publicize in China the large-scale
Overseas Development Assistance (ODA—the formal name for Japan’s eco-
nomic development assistance) to China. Starting in the late 1970s and continu-
ing through the mid-1990s, Japan provided generous development assistance
to China: low-interest loans and gratis assistance. China ranked as the sec-
ond top recipient of Japanese ODA. Japanese assistance supported hundreds
of projects in China. Yet the Chinese government did not actively publicize
Japan’s assistance, and public opinion surveys in the 1990s found that most
Chinese were unaware of it. Japan had initially hoped that large-scale economic
assistance to China would win Chinese goodwill and help leave behind past
animosities. That did not happen. In fact, anti-Japanese sentiment in China
grew stronger even as Japan supplied generous ODA to China. Gradually, the
Japanese began to suspect that Beijing wanted to maintain popular animosity
against Japan as a way of strengthening regime legitimacy.^7
In 1991, Japan decided to link ODA to restraint on military spending, since
China’s spiraling defense spending had become a major concern. The Chinese
media responded by dismissing Japan’s ODA as part of a Japanese bid for
regional leadership. Japan gave ODA for its own selfish reasons and thus did