Guest Post: Does Economic Coercion Work? Evidence from China’s Import Restrictions on Japanese Seafood
This is a guest post from Yoshimichi Ishikawa, Associate Professor, University of Shizuoka, Japan
In August 2023, China suspended imports of all Japanese aquatic products following the release of ALPS-treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The measure was widely discussed in Japan as an example of economic coercion. I previously examined its consistency with the WTO SPS Agreement in an EJIL: Talk! post.
More than three years have now passed, but Japanese seafood exports to China remain negligible. We can now look beyond the immediate impact of the measure and ask a different question: did this economic coercion work?
This post looks at how Japanese seafood exports changed after the restrictions, with particular attention to whether exports that could no longer go to China were redirected to other markets.
What happened to Japanese seafood exports?
For this analysis, I identified 213 seafood product categories using Japan’s nine-digit statistical classification, based on the seafood categories in Japan’s trade statistics. I then traced their monthly export values from January 2022 through July 2026. The accompanying spreadsheet file contains the underlying product-level data.
Of these 213 products, 106 had been exported to China before the restrictions. Their average monthly export value to China fell by 99.9 per cent after the measure was introduced. In practical terms, direct exports to China almost disappeared.
At the same time, the average monthly export value of these products to all other markets — the rest of the world (ROW) — increased by about 30 per cent. At first sight, this looks like trade diversion: exports that could no longer go to China may have been redirected to third-country markets.
But there is one important problem. The other 107 products had not been exported to China before the restrictions, yet their average monthly export value to the ROW also increased by about 26 per cent. It is therefore possible that Japanese seafood exports were simply increasing more generally during this period.
Was it trade diversion?
The next question is whether the increase in ROW exports really reflected trade diversion following the loss of the Chinese market. I focused on how dependent each product had been on China before the restrictions.
The idea was simple. If trade diversion occurred, products that had relied more heavily on China should show larger increases in exports to other markets after the restrictions. I therefore tested whether this pattern could be seen in the trade data.
The result supports this view. A 10 percentage point higher pre-restriction share of exports going to China was associated with an estimated 16.9 per cent higher monthly export value to the ROW after the restrictions. This makes it difficult to explain the increase in ROW exports only by general economic conditions or a broader increase in Japanese seafood exports. The result is consistent with trade diversion following the loss of the Chinese market. The accompanying Python replication code allows readers to reproduce this estimate.
What does this tell us about economic coercion?
China’s restrictions almost eliminated direct exports of the affected products to the Chinese market. At the same time, however, products that had relied more heavily on China showed larger increases in exports to third-country markets. The restrictions therefore caused a major disruption in bilateral trade, but the trade data also point to reallocation toward alternative markets.
Previous research has shown that exporters targeted by economic coercion can reduce its economic impact by redirecting trade elsewhere. Ferguson, Waldron and Lim (2023), for example, identify reallocation to alternative markets as an important response to China’s trade restrictions against Australia. The Japanese seafood case shows a similar pattern.