ABSTRACT
As a top aid recipient that is now the source of many of Japan’s most pressing diplomatic, political, and economic concerns, China occupies a unique place in the transnational debates about Japanese aid. In this chapter, Saori Katada examines the politics of Japanese aid to China, contributing to several of this book’s central themes. China’s rise might be used as an example of the success of Japanese ODA in prompting development, but the sense of threat it now provokes in Tokyo calls into question precisely what goals ODA should have. Increasingly, aid seems defensible only when it is defined as a solution to transnational problems-like acid rain from Chinese factories that might fall in Japan. Katada’s chapter thus speaks to one of this volume’s central concerns: the ways in which transnationalisms reshape the political and intellectual representations of development problems and aid solutions.
