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- China is Japan’s biggest trading partner and imports between the two countries have been down by 50 percent since the start of the pandemic.
Japan will use more than $2.2 billion of the country’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) economic package to incentivize its manufacturers to move their production out of China as its international relations are at risk after the pandemic started.
The plan is said to provide $2 billion for manufacturers to transfer production to Japan and over $216 million for other companies to move theirs to another country.
Japan’s main imports are from China as it is its biggest trading partner. But it all went down 50 percent in February as facilities in China were closed amid the coronavirus spread in the country.
Chinese President Xi Jinping scheduled visit to Japan scheduled earlier this month was postponed indefinitely. It was supposed to be a first for such a visit in a decade.
“We are doing our best to resume economic development,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said during a presscon in Beijing.
“In this process, we hope other countries will act like China and take proper measures to ensure the world economy will be impacted as little as possible and to ensure that supply chains are impacted as little as possible.”
A number of politicians in Japan and America have placed the blame on China for failing to report the earlier stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country. It allegedly concealed the real scale of the threat from other nations.
But despite recent developments, Japan still managed to donate masks and personal protective equipment to China.
“Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the Japanese government and people have expressed sympathy, understanding, and support to us,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying.
