A view of the Tokyo Tower at sundown in Tokyo, Japan. /Xinhua
Editor’s word: CGTN’s First Voice gives immediate commentary on breaking tales. The column clarifies rising points and higher defines the news agenda, providing a Chinese perspective on the most recent international occasions.
China’s choice to position 20 Japanese entities on its export management record isn’t an impulsive act of financial nationalism. Rather, it’s solely justified, cheap, and lawful that’s geared toward curbing Japan’s remilitarization.
Japan in latest months has been revising its safety posture, increasing protection spending, and buying army capabilities that go effectively past the pacifist spirit of its post-war structure. The nation’s draft funds for fiscal 2026 allocates roughly 9.04 trillion yen ($58 billion) to protection, the best degree on file.
Worse nonetheless, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has blatantly provoked China on its Taiwan area, hinting at the potential for armed intervention within the Taiwan Strait. She additionally instructed Tokyo and Washington may take joint motion in any Taiwan disaster, pledging Japan would by no means abandon its ally.
Alongside its army build-up and provocative remarks, Japan is deepening its integration into US-led nuclear and prolonged deterrence frameworks. The two international locations reaffirmed their “shared determination to further enhance the alliance’s deterrence and response capabilities” throughout the Extended Deterrence Dialogue in Washington final week.
For any regional participant, a neighbor that’s boosting protection spending, buying long-range strike capabilities, enjoyable arms export guidelines and tightening nuclear deterrence cooperation with Washington seems much less like a purely defensive actor and extra like a state on a path towards remilitarization.
People attend a protest in entrance of the Japanese Prime Minister’s official residence in Tokyo, Japan, December 4, 2025. /CFP
Given the above, China’s export management is thus an affordable and justified response to safety realities. The affected companies sit near Japan’s industrial and aerospace complicated, together with subsidiaries of Kawasaki Heavy Industries and IHI Corporation. These are the sectors by which the road between civilian and army use is normally blurred, from precision parts for plane to superior supplies for naval platforms.
Effective instantly, Chinese corporations are now not allowed to ship dual-use items to the entities on the record, and abroad suppliers are likewise barred from offering them with any China-made dual-use merchandise. For China, permitting unconstrained flows of Chinese-origin dual-use parts into such entities could be strategically nave and harmful.
But it’s value noting that China’s export controls are directed solely at a small variety of Japanese entities and apply solely to dual-use objects. They don’t have an effect on regular financial and commerce exchanges between China and Japan. Japanese entities that act in good religion and in compliance with the legislation, as China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) famous, don’t have any trigger for concern.
Entities listed on the watch record might apply for removing after fulfilling their verification obligations in accordance with related rules, in response to the MOFCOM announcement. This means China’s export management measures will not be blanket embargos. Instead, they level to a focused and adjustable step targeted on specific classes of threat.
By focusing on dual-use flows and leaving broader industrial commerce intact, the Chinese authorities has managed to stability its two imperatives: defending its safety pursuits whereas avoiding decoupling that might hurt its personal exporters and international markets.
Therefore, China’s management measures in opposition to sure Japanese entities will not be an act of financial nationalism as some Westerners hype. They are grounded in legislation and framed in non-proliferation and nationwide safety phrases. They reply to a strategic setting by which Japan is shifting away from its pacifist, post-war posture to remilitarization and rearming beneath the umbrella of a US-led safety structure that overtly treats Beijing as its “threat.”
The creator Jianxi Liu is a Beijing-based analyst of political and worldwide relations. With 10 years of expertise in media, she writes on matters pertaining to the US, the EU, and the Middle East.
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Source: CGTN