China and Japan to resume security talks

Demetri Sevastopulo in Tokyo

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday his government was laying the ground for a bilateral summit with China on the sidelines of a meeting of Asia Pacific leaders in Beijing next week.

“Both Japan and China are coming to the view that it would benefit not just the two countries but regional stability if a summit is held,” Mr Abe said on television. 

Earlier on Friday, China and Japan agreed to resume talks over foreign policy and security issues in an agreement that paves the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping and Mr Abe to meet for the first time at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum The two leaders have not met since they both came to power in late 2012.

The Japanese foreign ministry said both sides had agreed to disagree on the issue of the Senkaku Islands – a chain in the East China Sea that Japan controls but China claims and calls the Diaoyu – but that they would create a mechanism to prevent the situation from deteriorating. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, also said that the nations had reached agreement over resuming dialogue.

The two Asian powers have been at loggerheads since September 2012 when Japan bought three of the Senkaku Islands from their private Japanese owner. China accused Japan of breaching an unwritten agreement not to change the status quo over the long-disputed chain. But Japan said it was essential to block Shintaro Ishihara, the then governor of Tokyo, from buying the islands.

At an Apec meeting in Vladivostok in early September 2012, then Chinese president Hu Jintao warned Yoshihiko Noda, then Japanese prime minister, about the pending move. The foreign policy expert said the Japanese government interpreted the warning as a “performance” for the domestic Chinese audience and did not realise the strength of the Chinese opposition.

The move sparked an immediate deterioration in ties between the countries, with Japanese diplomats reporting that they were unable to obtain even low-level meetings in China. Beijing started sending Chinese ships to the Senkaku Islands where they routinely entered Japanese waters, raising concerns of a confrontation – accidental or otherwise – that would also draw in the US.

What are the prospects for some form of detente between Japan and China? Ahead of next week’s Apec summit, where leaders of the two countries are expected to meet, Ben Hall discusses the reasons for the strained relations between the two countries with Beijing bureau chief Jamil Anderlini and David Pilling, Asia editor.

By late 2013, relations were starting to thaw. But they suffered another blow in December when Mr Abe visited the Yasukuni shrine. The shrine serves as a memorial to Japan’s 2.4m war dead, but it also houses the “souls” of 14 convicted Class A war criminals. Visits to the shrine spark strong criticism from China and South Korea, which accuse Japan and Mr Abe of trying to revise Japan’s wartime history of aggression.

Mr Abe, widely considered a nationalistic prime minister, had impressed his critics by not visiting the shrine in 2006 during his first stint as prime minister. But his decision to worship there last year destroyed hopes that the Sino-Japanese relationship would improve.

The Japanese leader also drew unusually strong criticism from the US, Japan’s most important ally, because of concerns that his actions were unnecessarily raising tensions in the region.

Ahead of next week’s Apec summit, China had been imposing two main conditions for a possible meeting between Mr Xi and Mr Abe. First, Beijing wanted Japan to concede that there was a dispute over the Senkaku Islands, which Tokyo was unwilling to do. It also wanted Mr Abe to give a guarantee that he would not visit Yasukuni again. While the agreement announced on Friday provided a kind of “strategic ambiguity” over the Senkaku Islands, it made no mention of Yasukuni.

In recent months, Chinese state media have toned down their criticism of Japan, suggesting that Beijing was more amenable to a summit. Hitoshi Tanaka, a former senior Japanese diplomat, said China might agree to a meeting because it “would not like to see a situation where Apec is spoiled by some kind of friction or bad atmosphere”.

On Friday, Ken Okaniwa, Japanese government spokesman, said Mr Abe had not agreed to halt his visits to the Yasukuni shrine. “The prime minister’s position on this question is what he has said repeatedly in the past.”

He also summarised a Japanese press release issued earlier in the evening, saying that both sides had “some shared recognition to face history squarely and look towards the future – in that spirit both countries will overcome the political difficulties that affect [their] relations.

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“Both sides recognise there are differences on views regarding the tensions which have occurred in recent years in the East China Sea. They shared the view to prevent the deterioration of the situation through dialogue and consultation.”

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