On October 22, 1978, Deng Xiaoping arrived in Tokyo for a week long visit, the first by a Chinese leader to Japan since the founding of the People's Republic. The main purpose was the exchange of the instruments of ratification of the treaty of peace and friendship between the two countries, which had been signed in Beijing in August 1978, and the ceremony was held in the Japanese capital on October 23. He also met the emperor and the prime minister, Takeo Fukuda.
He used the visit to look at industry. He toured a steel works, a car factory and a shipyard, and he travelled on the new high speed railway to Kyoto, and he said openly that China had much to learn from Japanese methods of management and from Japanese technology. The tour was wide. He invited Japanese firms to invest and to take part in the modernisation programme that was being drawn up at the time, and he met business leaders as well as politicians. The message was carried in the press on both sides.
The timing mattered. China had just begun to change its economic policy, and the visit came at the start of a period in which Japanese loans and equipment, and later Japanese factories, played a large part in Chinese industrial growth. Trade between the two countries rose quickly through the 1980s. The visit also served a diplomatic purpose, since it showed that China was ready to work with its neighbours while its relations with the Soviet Union remained cold.
It was the first of many such journeys by Chinese leaders, and it is remembered as the moment the country turned outward after years of isolation. The door opened. Japanese official aid and investment became one of the largest sources of foreign capital in China in the following decades, and the treaty of peace and friendship remains in force.