Page 2 of 2 Chinese premier's 'ice-melting' Japan
visit By Hisane Masaki
urged Japan to take "concrete action" to
face up to its wartime history.
"For the
sake of friendship and cooperation, it is
necessary to sum up and remember the lessons from
the unfortunate past history," Wen said. "Peace
and friendship between China and Japan have a
serious bearing upon our countries' destiny and
the well-being of our peoples."
Focusing
on the history issue in the first half of his
40-minute
speech, Wen acknowledged
Japan's repeated apologies over its wartime
aggressions but stressed, "We sincerely hope that
Japan will demonstrate it with actual concrete
actions." These remarks were apparently directed
to Abe's recent denial of the Japanese military's
involvement in wartime sex slavery and were also
widely taken as a thinly veiled warning to Abe not
to visit Yasukuni Shrine while in office.
Wen stopped short of naming any specific
history issues but was quoted as telling Abe, "The
history issue is a grave problem that affects
national sentiment and the political foundations
of our relations ... It will be an obstacle to our
ties if not tackled properly."
Sino-Japanese relations sharply
deteriorated under Abe's predecessor, Junichiro
Koizumi, who upset Beijing by repeatedly visiting
Yasukuni, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that honors
some convicted war criminals involved in the
invasion of China and much of Asia before and
during World War II, along with some 2.5 million
other war dead.
During the last few years
of Koizumi's five-and-a-half-year premiership,
China shunned top-level contacts with him, even
during international conferences in third
countries, in protest against what it viewed as
his glorification of Japan's militaristic past.
But bilateral relations began to warm up
when Abe succeeded Koizumi last September and made
a fence-mending trip to Beijing soon afterward. In
the Chinese capital, Abe met with top leaders,
including President Hu and Premier Wen. They
agreed to "strive to build a mutually beneficial
relationship based on common strategic interests",
according to a joint press statement issued then.
In stark contrast with the Koizumi era,
during which Sino-Japanese relations were often
said to be "hot in business" amid booming trade
and investment but "cold in politics", this week's
meeting between Abe and Wen was the third in just
six months. They also met during an international
conference in the Philippines in January. Abe also
met with Hu during another international
conference in Vietnam last November.
In
his Wednesday talks with Wen, Abe touched on
Japan's concerns over the lack of transparency in
China's military buildup. In response to Wen's
request, Abe, who is known as a pro-Taiwan
politician, also reassured the Chinese leader that
Japan will uphold its "one China" policy and will
not support Taiwan's independence.
Beijing
views with deep suspicion the move toward a
stronger security alliance between Japan and the
United States, especially since a peaceful
settlement to tensions in the Taiwan Strait was
included in a list of common strategic goals to be
pursued by Tokyo and Washington under the new
security arrangements. Beijing still regards
Taiwan as a renegade province that must be
reunified with the mainland, by force if
necessary.
Wen was also received by the
emperor on Thursday and met with business leaders
later in the day. He was scheduled to visit the
ancient capital Kyoto, in western Japan, where he
was to join in a game of baseball with college
students and drop in at a farmer's home on Friday,
before returning to China.
Putting a
smiling face on the visit, Chief Cabinet Secretary
Yasuhisa Shiozaki, Japan's top government
spokesman, declared, "We're not aware of any
remaining ice."
To be sure, as an array of
cooperation agreements reached this week show,
Wen's visit seems to have made the recent trend of
warming bilateral relations even more
irreversible. But despite the "ice-melting", it
seems that snow and ice covering the Sino-Japanese
political landscape are still so thick that they
will not melt easily.
Hisane
Masaki is a Tokyo-based journalist,
commentator and scholar on international politics
and economy. Masaki's e-mail address is
yiu45535@nifty.com.
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