A finding from the Opium War to Yasukuni by a Japanese....
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=bbs&order=msg&author=abc2005
I did some research using google.com, and compiled a brief history of historical events between China and Japan.
1. The Sino-Japanese war in 1894-1895 ended with the Treaty of Shimonoseki. China had to pay 230 million “liang” of silver to Japan. The amount was the equivalent of 5 years of China’s revenue in 1895. Of which, 200 million were war indemnity (to be paid in 7 years, with 5% interest per year), and 30 million are in exchange for Japan to give up its demand for China to cede Liaodong Peninsula, so as to avoid “encroaching” the sphere of influence of a few other foreign countries. Japan held up the Chinese territory of Shandong (province) as a collateral before the final installment was made. By contrast, the war indemnity paid to England (same to France) in the “second opium war” was 2 million “liang”. See: http:/ / www.answers.com/ topic/ second-opium-war. (Similar amount for the first opium war.) Taiwan, a Chinese territory at the time, was ceded to Japan, and Korea became a Japanese colony and was later annexed by Japan. See: http:/ / www.ibiblio.org/ chinesehistory/ contents/ c10s08.html. The war indemnity was partly financed by interest hungry Western banks. This set a precedent, 4 years afterwards other envious powers swarmed to China to join Japan in this new front of extracting quick money (see next paragraph). Tax burden on Chinese became much, much heavier after 1895 because of the need to make the payment.
2. Japan was among the EIGHT countries (Japan, US and 6 European countries) that won another war in China during 1899-1900. After a year’s bargaining, China agreed to pay 450 million “liang” of silver in war indemnity to NINE countries (protocol of 1901). The ninth country did not participate in the war but was offered a share of the war indemnity to maintain “fairness”. The annual interest rate was 4%. The craziness in the amount is that, the annual interest payment alone was already the equivalent of 1/ 5 of China’s budget in 1901 (not to mention that the tax rate was already much higher than in 1895 because of the need to pay the previous war indemnity to Japan). In 1911, Qing dynasty collapsed, and the Chinese were squeezed to the bones. The US (was the only country that) “returned” (part of full? of) its receipt from the war indemnity, and used it to start today’s Beijing University and Tsinghua University. I should also point out that by ignorance, the Chinese ruler (the Empress Dowager), who was under stronger and stronger pressure from greedy foreign powers, made a fatal misjudgment to rely on Chinese “boxers” to fight the fully armed foreigners. Under strong emotions, she made the irrational decision to declare war on “ALL countries” (but the order was ignored by many Chinese provinces, including these in Southern, Eastern and Central China.) After 1911, China entered 20+ years of political chaos, student movement, the rise of the Nationalists and then communists, and often, civil wars and famine. It is worth mentioning that Japanese conspiracy never stopped in China. The student movement in May 4th 1919 helped Chinese government to refuse the Paris “peace treaty” in which Germany’s “rights” in Liaodong Peninsula be transferred to Japan as a reward for Japan’s fighting Germany, even though China was also considered as an ally.
3. Japan “entered” Manchuria (without any treaty) soon after 1895. China had no power to stop it. Japan in 1931 expelled the Chinese troops after they raised the flag of the new Chinese Nationalists’ government and declared themselves as followers of Sun Yat-sen. Japan then made Manchuria an “independent country” (ironically, using the fallen Qing emperor as Manchuria’s new “emperor”). Then they went on to conspire on the “autonomy” for Northern China, but were met with resistance by the Chinese from both North and South. Japan eventually expanded its “ventures” to a full-scale war against China in summer of 1937 (first shot fired near Beijing – in Northern China). The under equipped Chinese had to face the Japanese military alone for five and half years, until they were joined by the US and other allies in December 1941 (due to Pearl Harbor). In this war, more than 20 million Chinese were killed (estimates by Westerners). Japanese did all crimes possible in China during this time, including free shooting of Chinese prisoners for training purpose, live human testing of bio-chemical weapons (these war criminals were never prosecuted due to a couple of foreign countries’ hunger for the data after the war, but decades later some Japanese soldiers in its infamous “chemical unit” started telling some of the real stories).
4. The Chinese communists dwindled to a couple of ten thousand in mid 1930s, and the Nationalists (followers of Sun Yat-Sen) were about to unite the country, but Japanese invasion revived the communists. They grew to millions strong at the end of the war in 1945. The communists took all China in 1949 and committed crimes in some years of their rule. Chinese need not blame Japan for this, but it is clear that without Japanese invasion, China would never become a communist country. (It is a relief that China today in essence is no longer a communist country although it will probably take many more years for it to move to democracy.)
5. In 60 years after the war, Japan refused any hint of war reparations and turned down the lawsuits filed by numerous victims. Instead, elected Japanese leaders have in recent years started to pay annual visits to the war shrine that hosts all the 14 class A war criminals, the fanatics responsible for murdering millions and millions of Chinese (and victimizing many innocent people from the other parts of Asia and the rest of the world). These criminals are now hailed as “heroes” in Japan. It has refused to fully clean up the chemical weapons that were still left in China and instead made its resolution as a bargaining chip. They blame the Chinese (and the Koreans) for playing the “victims’ role”. (Southern Korea’s president recently said publicly, “It is unfortunate to have Japan as a neighbor”. But this did nothing to change Japan’s attitude.)
6. Elected Japanese officials keep blaming China for every little thing, although China has done nothing that really hurt Japan in substance. It is a popular game to blame the Chinese -- whether communists or ordinary Chinese. The Chinese military spending today is still less than half of Japan’s (contrary to the misconception fanned by Japan and the US right wing). Chinese military does not even have an aircraft carrier while all 3 big neighbors (Japan, Russia, India) do. In the same spirit, Japanese blame China’s backwardness SOLELY on Chinese “themselves”, and insist that Japanese fighting and pirating on China for a half century had NOTHING to do with China’s backwardness. It is true that many European countries and Japan were ruined in the World War 2 and they recovered fairly quickly after the war. However, the economic rise of the post war Europe or Japan was never reproduced in ANY country that was already poor before the World War 2. That is because it takes much less to repair than to build from nothing. This can be said for infrastructure such as highways or railway, or mines or factories, or human skills that go with industry, etc, etc. After wars ended in China in 1949, China’s DGP grew by close to 10% in an average year, but China is still a developing country because it started from half century’s destruction and economic stalemate directly or indirectly caused by Japan.
A few notes: Contrary to common Chinese and Western misconceptions, China’s average GDP growth rate was no less during 1949-1970s than from 1970s to present (even there were temporary setbacks caused by policy mistakes during 1958-1962, “great leap forward movement”). During the Cultural Revolution, China’s growth averaged 10+ % per year. I am not saying Cultural Revolution was good to Chinese (quite the contrary). I am just stating a fact. Did the Chinese annual statistics exaggerate China’s GDP growth? Indeed, the Chinese government makes up numbers from time to time (same way as the Western historians who made up China’s history during years they were allied with Japan against red China). However, it is mathematically impossible to consistently overstate China’s GDP growth rates for so many years. If it overstates the growth rate by a couple of percentage a year for 50+ years (since 1949), then the official GDP figure in 2004 would be several times bigger than the actual GDP (simple arithmetic). Quite the contrary, some Western economists believe that the official Chinese GDP figures in recent years understated the true size of the Chinese economy. So, in average, China did not overstate its growth rate. It may have in fact understated its growth, but the average size of understatement is not big, for the same mathematical reason.
On Japan’s ODA (official development aid) to China
Total cumulative Japanese ODA to China (from its inception in 1979 to the end of 2004) were 3333.5 billion Japanese yen, 3133.1 billion of which are long-term government loans in yen. That is equivalent of $30.9 billion using the exchange rate of May 27th, 2005, “107.88 yen = 1 US dollar” (in fact, Japanese yen has appreciated since 1979, making it more valuable today in dollar terms than in most years of the past). By comparison, China’s foreign reserve at the end of 2004 was $609.9 billion.
Japan basically has made $0.95 ODA ($0.89 in loan and $0.06 in gift) to each Chinese (1.3 billion total) in an average year since 1979, even if we use today’s exchange rate. Japan’s ODA on one hand was helpful to China and China is grateful for it; on the other hand, it was helpful to make Japanese goods enter China (but Japanese do not mention such benefit at all). Although China is grateful for any helps, big or small, it is such a shame for the Japanese prime minister to say that China “graduated” from Japanese aid.
Japanese ODA loan to China in year 2004 was already reduced to $796 million (85.9 billion yen). By the way, China now is offering billions (US dollars) of low cost government loans to SE Asian countries. Did Chinese press insist that the SE countries should be grateful to China for the ODA? The truth is that, most Chinese are even unaware of these Chinese loans to SE Asia. After all, such ODA is common in international commerce, and it serves the interest of both parties. Not to mention that such ODA is only an unsubstantial part of the commerce.
Elected Japanese officials and Japanese press talk as if China’s fast growth was not possible without Japan’s ODA, and thus intentionally mislead the public (this is proven by the misconceptions shown by a handful of Americans on many message boards). They also confuse it with war reparations. They intentionally make the Chinese look ungrateful.
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