Japan and China: Edging closer

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

UNMISTAKABLE signs of a thaw in the frozen relations between China and Japan are growing. Indeed, the betting now is that Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, will meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in November, on the margins of the APEC trade meeting that China will host in Beijing. Until now, China has considered Mr Abe beyond the pale because of his visit last December to Tokyo’s imperialist Yasukuni shrine.

The thaw began in the summer. In July a former Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, called on Mr Xi. He bore a soothing letter from Mr Abe and shared a “sense of crisis” over the two countries’ troubled relations. Elsewhere, Chinese and Japanese academics and officials have quietly met to try to work out how to bring their two countries closer. Mr Xi himself has declared that China wants “long-term, steady and healthy” relations with Japan. Several dozen Japanese business leaders were recently welcomed in the Chinese capital. On September 23rd-24th Japanese and Chinese officials met in the Chinese port city of Qingdao to resume talks about matters of concern in the East China Sea. And now Mr Abe himself has, for the first time, mused publicly about how nice it would be to meet Mr Xi.

The Qingdao meeting, the first of its kind in two years, was especially striking. At it, China and Japan agreed to start work between their respective defence ministries on ways to deal with things such as unintended collisions and other emergencies at sea. Since China began aggressively challenging Japan’s control of the Senkaku islands in 2012 (China lays claim to the uninhabited islands, which it calls the Diaoyu), coastguard vessels from both sides encounter each other just about every day. Quite apart from issues of maritime safety, a minor incident could swiftly escalate into military conflict. Both Japan and America, its protector, have long called for China to accept a hotline to Japan.

As for the two countries’ leaders, even a perfunctory handshake in Beijing would be something, while a substantive meeting would be best of all. Japanese go-betweens have quietly been assuring the Chinese that Mr Abe’s visit to Yasukuni, which honours convicted war criminals among the war dead, was his last while in office. The Chinese have long insisted on Mr Abe’s clear undertaking that he will not revisit Yasukuni, but it is very hard to imagine him giving one.

It is equally hard to imagine the Japanese giving ground on the other Chinese condition for a resumption of top-level ties, namely Japan’s acknowledgment that the Senkakus are in dispute. (China has never knowingly controlled them, and only relatively recently rustled up a claim to them.) That is why back-channel efforts are under way to arrive at a vaguely worded formula that would allow both sides to climb down and set the matter of the islands to one side. Don’t hold your breath.

Despite China’s earlier stipulations, a rapprochement is possible. The Chinese government knows it will be doing itself no favours by being seen to beat up Japan while hosting the summit and taking part in other big gatherings in the region (the East Asia Summit in Myanmar and the G20 in Australia) at around the same time. Some Japanese also think that China is motivated to improve relations because of a sharply slowing economy. Among other things, Japanese direct investment into China has fallen by over two-fifths so far in 2014 compared with a year earlier, as Japanese firms seek to invest elsewhere in South-East Asia—in part, at least, because of rocky bilateral relations. Yet senior Japanese officials remain deeply cynical about the possibility of normal relations with a country they regard as assertive, aggressive, sometimes arrogant, and expansionist, and which respects the rule of law, as they represent it, only when it suits it.

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