The President of China met the Prime Minister of Japan for talks yesterday aimed at cooling down rivet-hot passions and seemingly-spiraling-out-of-control events that brought relations between the two countries to their lowest point since diplomatic ties were established 30 years ago.
The bottom line: Japan extended an olive branch. China accepted it. And then twisted it. Reports CNN:
Chinese President Hu Jintao has warned that his country’s dispute with Japan over Tokyo’s World War II aggression could affect the stability and development of Asia, and urged the Japanese to back up their apologies with action.
Hu was speaking after a 55-minute meeting on Saturday evening with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on the sidelines of the Asian-African summit in Jakarta.
“At the moment Sino-Japanese relations face a difficult situation. Such a difficult situation is not one we want to see,” Hu told reporters after the closed-door meeting.
If the problem cannot be solved “it would be detrimental to China and Japan and would affect stability and development in Asia,” he added.
Japan’s Prime Minister put a better spin on it:
Koizumi told reporters it was a “very good meeting,” as he left the venue.
Koizumi also used diplomatic-speak in describing the meeting as a “very frank meeting,” which usually means they weren’t exactly embracing. Indeed, one of the most important statements made by China has not gotten major play by the press so far:
On the Taiwan issue, Hu said he “hoped that the Japanese side will demonstrate concrete actions, its adherence to the One-China policy and opposition to Taiwan’s independence.”
Japan and the United States have cited Taiwan as a joint security concern and China has objected to that. China says it would oppose any move by Japan to acknowledge Taiwanese efforts for independence.
Still, it isn’t accurate to say the meeting was a flop, as the Washington Post points out:
Chinese President Hu Jintao urged Japan to translate its remorse over wartime atrocities into “actual action” during a much-anticipated meeting here Saturday that both sides said they hoped would ease dangerously heightened tensions between the two countries.
Hu and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reached no substantive agreements in their 46-minute talk, which analysts said could be a starting point for improved relations.
The meeting took place a day after Koizumi, addressing an Asian-African summit attended by representatives of more than 100 countries, reiterated an apology for World War II aggression against Asian countries.
The tensions had been building for months, but only in recent weeks did anti-Japanese protests involving thousands of young demonstrators erupt in a dozen Chinese cities. The protests were sparked by Japan’s approval of school textbooks that the Chinese and Koreans say gloss over Japan’s wartime atrocities, its sex slavery of Asian women, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre that historians estimate killed 200,000 to 300,000 people and Japan’s bid to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.
“I would like you to recognize history correctly, and I would like you to translate your remorse into actual action,” Hu told Koizumi during the meeting.
Particularly vexing for China are pilgrimages by Koizumi and other Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to Japan’s military dead, including convicted war criminals. Though Koizumi last visited the shrine in January 2004, a delegation of Japanese lawmakers went to the shrine on Friday and offered prayers.
But this now cuts both ways: Japan’s Foreign Minister has now criticized Chinese textbooks, as The Scotsman notes:
Chinese textbooks are “extreme� in their interpretation of history, Japan’s foreign minister said today.
It came a day after China’s president demanded Tokyo do more to improve relations damaged by new Japanese school textbooks that allegedly whitewash wartime atrocities.
However, despite the criticism, Nobutaka Machimura hailed a meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Indonesia, saying it has paved the way for the two Asian powers to start repairing battered ties that have led to violent anti-Japanese protests across China.“From the perspective of a Japanese person, Chinese textbooks appear to teach that everything the Chinese government has done has been correct,� Machimura said on a TV Asahi talk show.
“There is a tendency toward this in any country, but the Chinese textbooks are extreme in they way they uniformly convey the ’our country is correct’ perspective.�
Meanwhile, a Reuters report suggests that China is taking steps to cool the situation in its country down:
Chinese police issued a strong warning on Thursday that those who took part in unauthorized protests would be punished and that it was illegal to use cell phone text messages or Internet bulletin boards to organize demonstrations without approval.
China also sent veteran diplomats to give lectures on the benefits as well as the history of Sino-Japanese ties to Communist Party members and officials as well as university students, who were urged to focus on their studies.
But that still doesn’t mean the demonstration’s still weren’t enabled by the Chinese government. As many analysts have pointed out, if the Chinese government had wanted to clamp down on them it could have done so. It didn’t even look the other way: it held up one hand suggesting “stop” while holding another hand out motioning for the demonstrators to unofficially continue.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.