Abstract
The modern history of Sino-Japanese economic relations extends from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is a story of extraordinary interest — not least because its present phase is far from complete. Before 1949 Japan’s economic adventure in China involved not only commodity trade, but direct investment, population migration, military occupation, experiments in economic planning and, ultimately, nominal political independence within the Japanese imperial system and a ‘rationalised’ position within the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The defeat of Japan in 1945 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 ended both the political dream and direct involvement in the Chinese economy. The influence of the Japanese past, however, remained a critical determinant of China’s development in the 1950s; and after 1960, severance of China’s links with Japan’s long-standing rival in China, the Soviet Union, resulted in renewed development of trade. The re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972 was followed by further growth of trade and of increasingly complex financial, resource and political relationships. Today, Japan is arguably China’s most important economic link with the outside world and a key to her economic future; although to the Japanese, who have resolved the problems of their inter-war economy outside the East Asian region, China’s importance is perhaps more political, strategic, even psychological, than economic in the narrow sense.
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Notes
The main general sources for this section are: T. Hoshino Economic History of Manchuria (Seoul: Bank of Chosen, 1921);
Alexander Hosie, Manchuria, its Peoples, Resources and Recent History (London: Methuen, 1904);
Kungtu C. Sun and Ralph Huenemann, The Economic Development of Manchuria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard East Asian Monographs no. 28, 1969);
Kang Chao, The Economic Development of Manchuria: The Rise of a Frontier Economy (Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies no. 43, 1983).
Sources for the early history of the Chinese railways include P. H. B. Kent, Railway Enterprise in China: An Account of Its Origin and Development (London: Edward Arnold, 1907);
S. H. Chou, ‘Railway Development and Economic Growth in Manchuria’, China Quarterly, (Jan.-Mar. 1971) no. 45, pp. 57–84.
Hsü tao-Fu, Chung-Kuo chin-tai nung-yeh chi mao-yi t’ung-chi tzu-liao (Statistical Materials on Agriculture and Trade in Modern China) (Shanghai: Jen-min ch’u-pan she, 1983) p. 190.
A table showing the history of investment by firm and year is in Manshüshi Kenkyükai (ed.), Nihon teikokushugi ka no Manshû (Manchuria Under Japanese Imperialism) (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1972) p. 55. Japanese-Manchurian joint ventures are listed in The Manchoukuo Yearbook 1934, pp. 550–2.
Henry W. Kinney, Modern Manchuria and the South Manchurian Railway Company (Dairen: Akita Honten, 1928);
Kazuo Takemori, Mantetsu kōbōshi (A History of the Rise and Fall of the South Manchuria Railway) (Tokyo: Akita shoten, 1970).
Contemporary observers had no doubts about the SMR’s role, for example, Edgar Snow, Far Eastern Front (London: Jarrolds, 1934) p. 53. Snow’s book is a brilliant contemporary account of the early 1930s in China and Manchuria.
The Japanese origins of China’s iron and steel industry are described in M. Gardner Clark, The Development of China’s Steel Industry and Soviet Technical Aid (Ithaca, New York: 1973) ch. 1.
John E. Orchard, Japan’s Economic Position (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930) chs xvii and xviii;
Wang ch’eng-Ching, Tung-Pei chih ching-chi tzu-yuan (The Economic Resources of the North East) (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu kuan, 1947) ch. 4.
The political background is described in detail in Takehiko Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at Mukden: The Rise of the Japanese Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
Based primarily on Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Jipan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
Narusawa, Yomezô, Ishiwara Kanji (Tokyo: Keizai Oraisha, 1969).
T. A. Bisson, American Policy in the Far East 1931–1940 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940) pp. 84–6.
Kamekichi Takahashi, Manshû keizai to Nihon keizai (The Manchurian Economy and the Japanese Economy) (Tokyo: Chiyogura shobō, 1934) esp. pp. 227–40 and p. 318.
The development of the currency problem is outlined in Yamanari Kyoroku, The Monetary Policy of Manchukuo (Tokyo: The Japanese Council, 1936). The author was a Vice-President of the Manchukuo Central Bank.
Chō Yukio, ‘An Enquiry into the Problem of Importing American Capital into Manchuria’, in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto (eds), Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations 1931–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973) pp. 377–410.
K’ung ching-Wei, Chung Kuo chin-tai pai-nien ching-chi shih-kang (An Outline History of the Last Hundred Years of the Chinese Economy) (Kirin: Chi-lin jen-min ch’u-pan she, 1980) ch. 10 (on Japan)
Ma Hong (ed.), Chung-Kuo kung-yeh ching-chi wen-t’i yan-chiu (Research into Problems of Chinese Industry) (Peking: Chung-Kuo she-hui k’ohsiieh ch’u-pan she, 1982) ch. 1.
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© 1987 Ronald Dore and Radha Sinha
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Howe, C. (1987). Japan’s Economic Experience in China before the Establishment of the People’s Republic of China: a Retrospective Balance-sheet. In: Dore, R., Sinha, R. (eds) Japan and World Depression. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07520-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07520-1_11
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