Japan is only harming itself with wrongheaded China Exit strategy

Corporate Japan disagrees with policy, seeing the need to stay vested in China

People wearing face masks in Shanghai: Japan is one of many countries with a desire to bring production home from China, but Beijing is irritated because the initiative appears to be partly at the behest of the U.S. © Reuters

HENNY SENDER, Nikkei Asian Review columnist

September 11, 2020 13:34 JST

The COVID-19 pandemic gave Chinese President Xi Jinping a proper reason to cancel a planned visit to Tokyo in April, which would have reciprocated Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's 2019 trip to Beijing.

But the fact that no effort has been made to reschedule the trip, Japanese diplomats say, is a sign of how relations between Asia's two dominant powers have deteriorated.