Taking History as a Mirror, the Long-term Impact of the Anti-Japanese War on Sino-Japanese Trade—Analysis Based on Enterprises’ Data from Shandong Province

High-quality development of foreign trade is an important task during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period. This paper provides certain policy suggestions for the further development of Sino-Japanese trade and the construction of a new development pattern of the Party Central Committee. According to the statistics of the Shandong Provincial Party History Research Office, the detailed information of the people killed in each county (cities, districts) during the Second Sino-Japanese War, this paper uses a difference-in-differences model to examine whether the number of victims in each county (cities, districts) of Shandong Province during the Second Sino-Japanese War has an impact on the trade between Shandong enterprises in various industries and Japan. The results show that if the number of victims in each county (city, district) increases by 1%, the total trade and import value between each county (city, district) and Japan at the industry level will decrease by 0.239% and 0.366%, respectively, the export value was not significantly affected. We found that the negative impact of the number of victims on trade increased significantly when the political relationship between China and Japan was tense. Further analysis showed that the proportion of young victims significantly increased its inhibitory effect on total trade and imports. In addition, the imports of state-owned enterprises and enterprises in industries with higher total factor productivity were more negatively affected by the Second Sino-Japanese War. Finally, the robustness test of this paper shows that the negative impact of the number of victims on trade only exists in Sino-Japanese trade.