Paradoxically, Japan provides massive amounts of development aid to China, despite Japan's clear perception of China as a prime competitor in the Asia-Pacific region. This clearly written and comprehensive volume provides an overview of the way Japan's aid to China has developed since 1979. It explains the shifts that have taken place in Japan's China policy in the 1990s against the background of international changes and domestic changes in both countries, and offers new insights into the way Japanese aid policy making functions, thereby providing an alternative view of Japanese policy making that might be applied to other areas. Through a series of case studies, it shows Japan’s increasing willingness to use development aid to China for strategic goals and explains a significant shift of priority project areas of Japan’s China aid in the 1990s, from industrial infrastructure to socio-environmental infrastructure. The book argues that, contrary to the widely held view that Japan's aid to China is given for reasons of commercial self-interest, the objectives are much more complex and dynamic. Using original material, Takamine shows how policy making power within the Japanese government has shifted in recent years away from officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party.

Since the opening up of China in 1979, the country had experienced phenomenal economic growth over the decades and overtook Japan as the second-largest economy in 2010. With the establishment of a conservative administration led by Shinzo Abe in December 2012 and Xi Jinping's ascendance to power as the General Secretary of China's ruling party a month earlier, the two countries intensified their commitments in aid to Sub-Saharan Africa. Surveying the Japanese and Chinese aid in Sub-Saharan Africa, this book examines the two Asian giants' policies and achievements in past decades and discusses future directions of their aid initiatives. Japan and China: A Contest in Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa is recommended for those interested in understanding East Asian international relations and contemporary aid trends and issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The world order as we know it is currently undergoing profound changes, and in its wake, so is foreign aid. Donors of foreign aid, development assistance or development cooperation around the world are already facing new challenges in the changing development architecture. This is an architecture that globally seems to become increasingly forgiving of foreign aid as a win-win concept that also meets the donors’ own national interests—something that has been an unofficial Japanese trademark for many years. This book examines Japan’s development assistance as it transitions away from Official Development Assistance and towards Development Cooperation. In this transition, the strong and reciprocal relationships between Japanese development policy and comprehensive security, diplomacy, foreign, domestic and economic policies are likely to become even more consolidated and integrated. The utilization of, and changes within, Japanese development policy therefore affects not only recipients of foreign aid but also the relationships Japan enjoys with its allies and strategic partners, as well as the relations to competing donors and rivals in the region and around the world. Japanese foreign aid as such provides an extremely interesting case from where regional and even global changes can be understood. Written by a multidisciplinary team of contributors from the fields of political science, international relations, development, economics, public opinion and Japan studies, the book sets out to be innovative in capturing the essence of the changing patterns of development cooperation, and more importantly, Japan’s role in within it, in an era of great change. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Foreign Policy and International Relations.

Japanese and Chinese foreign aid play significant roles in each nation's foreign policy strategies as well as overseas development worldwide. Foreign aid and investment's importance has increased for both the People's Republic of China and Japan, especially as strategic competition between the two nations has increased since 2000. Many scholars have analyzed the similarities and differences in the two nations' aid strategies and distribution but have not yet closely examined and compared the sub-national players who determine aid policy in practice. As the agents that implement aid projects, these players translate upper-level strategy into action and, as a result, determine said strategy's success. This thesis investigates: how do the domestic bureaucracies in both Japan and China process various flows of information, interact with other actors, set agendas, and attempt to influence aid policy? Key factors in an aid agency or ministry's ability to shape aid decision-making include its autonomy relative to upper-level government organizations, its network with partner countries as well as domestic firms and financial institutions, and the cohesiveness of its bureaucratic culture. In the Japanese case, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) enjoys a high level of both formal and informal autonomy from the prime minister, cabinet and National Security Council, has maintained a close and distinct network with partner country bureaucrats and private sector actors, and has developed its own internal cultural norms that emphasize humanitarian and developmental impact. In contrast, China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), its primary aid coordinator, maintains some informal autonomy from the State Council, but lacks the agenda-setting power, networks, and bureaucratic culture to exert substantial decision-making power at the aid project level, particularly after the 2018 founding of the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA). The various other aid and investment implementers in both nations operate in similar institutional contexts where decision-making influence is determined by differences in information, networks, and internal values as well as formally delegated powers. As a result, in the Japanese case, lower-level agents and their understanding of partner country conditions more heavily influence aid decision-making, whereas high-level strategic directives are more determinative of Chinese aid decision-making.

Once the world's largest ODA provider, contemporary Japan seems much less visible in international development. However, this book demonstrates that Japan, with its own aid philosophy, experiences, and models of aid, has ample lessons to offer to the international community as the latter seeks new paradigms of development cooperation.