Author: Shiro Armstrong

There has been a lot happening in North East Asia recently. December 13th last year saw the first ever Japan-China-ROK Trilateral Summit Meeting. The meeting was in planning for a long time and long overdue, but given a sense of urgency due to the global financial crisis.

Now attention again has shifted back to the two giants, Japan and China, who have hit a rough patch right before the 9th Strategic Dialogue to be held today in Tokyo. The meeting is timely as last week saw the return of the dispute over the islands in the East China Sea which have potential oil and gas reserves. This issue has been the subject of past Strategic Dialogue meetings but goes back much further. It appeared to have been finally resolved in June last year in an historic agreement where joint exploration of the potential reserves was agreed to. Now private Chinese firms are said to be exploring the reserves on the Chinese side of the agreed border but the issue is whether they could be extracting reserves from the seabed on the Japanese side. Tokyo has lodged a series of official complaints.

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Author: Shiro Armstrong

Taro Aso is scheduled to visit Beijing on October 24 and 25 for the the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) but the focus of the trip will be in his planned meeting with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

Aso was foreign minister from October 2005 until August 2007 but did not visit China once. It would have been difficult for him to do so during Koizumi’s time (which doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have) but it is surprising he didn’t during Abe’s leadership which started in October 2006.

While Abe was breaking the ice, Wen Jiabao was melting the ice, Hu Jintao was playing ping pong and Fukuda was warming ties, Aso was making random noises in the background and staying away from China. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Shiro Armstrong

Taro Aso starts his prime ministership in Japan this week.

A few years ago you couldn’t imagine headlines such as ‘Aso vows to build friendly relationship with S. Korea, China’ or ‘Japan PM Hopeful Aso Seeks Friendship With China, S Korea’.

There is an underlying dynamic in the Japan-China relationship that is too strong for a hawk even of Aso’s stature to try fight – he has to go with it. The turning point in the Sino-Japanese relationship in recent times was the 2005 anti-Japan protests in China.

Aso as foreign minister moving (un?)willingly with the tide, AP Photo by Everett Kennedy Brown

The revision of Chinese history textbooks in Chinese high schools is one significant yet little known outcome of the turning point in the relationship.
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Author: Shiro Armstrong

The Japan-China relationship is improving.

That’s the result of a survey conducted by the China Daily and Tokyo-based non-profit group Genron-NPO, which polled 1,557 Chinese urban residents in five major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Chengdu and Shenyang, and 1,037 students in five Chinese universities. 1,000 urban residents and 400 ‘intellectuals’ were surveyed in Japan in June and July.

While each group surveyed responded more positively than the year before, the differences among the groups within the countries is stark. But more interesting is the disconnect in perceptions between the two countries.

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Author: Shiro Armstrong

There will always be some ‘noise’ in a relationship as big as that between Japan and China, no matter how close and robust it becomes. The important thing is that disagreements and tensions don’t dominate the relationship. Much of the tone depends on how the relationship is managed at the top, by each country’s leaders.

Yasukuni shrine

Last week’s news that three Japanese cabinet ministers, 53 Diet members, and former PM Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine on the 15th of August – the anniversary of the end of WWII and the most politically hot day for Japanese politicians to visit the shrine from a Chinese and Korean perspective – is the latest ‘noise’. The visit itself is not unexpected for domestic political reasons, and involved mostly the usual suspects. Cabinet members who went were Japanese Agricultural Minister Seiichi Ota, Justice Minister Okiharu Yasuoka, and Consumer Affairs Minister Seiko Noda.

A surprise was that former PM Koizumi also visited. This is curious since many believed Koizumi was only visiting Yasukuni shrine as Prime Minister to keep an election promise which he had to make to garner the support of the right. Mindy Kotler’s piece discusses Koizumi’s visit in more detail.

Fukuda of course stayed away from Yasukuni. More surprisingly, so did Taro Aso. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Shiro Armstrong

The 63rd anniversary of the end of the Sino-Japan war, and WWII, on the 15th of August last week passed with very little media attention, at least in the US and in Australia.

In fact last week was an even more significant week for Sino-Japan than usual. The 12th of August was the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship. This also, to my knowledge, passed without much press (there was some news of course, such as reports of then resident liaison of the Association for the Promotion of International Trade, Japan’s Hiroaki Kitamura’s insight into the negotiations of the Treaty).

This was not an insignificant treaty. Current Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s father Takeo Fukuda was Prime Minister then and was instrumental according to Yosuke Nakae, former director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asia bureau:

Fukuda and then Japanese Foreign Minister Sunao Sonoda were the two most important Japanese politicians in the negotiation for the treaty and their enthusiastic attitude and persistent efforts contributed much to the success of the negotiation.

He quotes Takeo Fukuda as saying the treaty helped upgrade Japan-China relations to an ‘iron bridge’ from a ‘hanging bridge when the two countries just formed diplomatic relations (in 1972). Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Shiro Armstrong

Hugh White on the solution to peace in Asia:

…Crispin suggests that the best solution is for China and Japan to learn to get on. Of course that is right, and we should all hope that they do. But how likely is that? And what if they don’t? Hoping for the best is not a policy.

Indeed, as the Republicans would say to the Obama camp, ‘hope is not a plan’, well, here is a step in the right direction (from Xinhuanet on Friday):

A senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) said here Friday that the CPC is willing to work with the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to promote the Sino-Japanese strategic and reciprocal partnership.

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Author: Dominic Meagher

The Japanese Destroyer, Sazanami was led into Zhanjiang military port yesterday by the Shenzhen, a Chinese missile destroyer (and the first Chinese navy ship to visit Tokyo last November).

This is the first time the Japanese navy has been in China since World War II.

The 4,600 ton warship and its 240 member crew arrived in Zhanjiang (in Guangdong province) loaded with relief supplies. The supplies (mostly food, blankets, hygiene masks and disinfectant) are being unloaded today and will travel by train to Sichuan to aid the recovery of the Sichuan earthquake victims. (CCTV)

The visit has received wide coverage in Chinese media, with Chinese sailors lined up to welcome the ship under the flags of both countries. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Shiro Armstrong

This headline says it all: Japan military to provide China quake aid. . . as Observing Japan says, these are indeed strange days.

*update: unfortunately both sides saw too many obstacles (historical and emotional) and as of Friday had to scrap the plan. Instead the Japanese government is chartering commercial aircraft to do the job.

Author: Shiro Armstrong

Ryan Manuel (China specialist in the MPhil program in Oxford) writes to me in response to my Japan-China op ed I referred to earlier :

. . . you are arguing that economic incentives are driving political reconciliation. However, what makes this argument relevant in the piece is that you are arguing that there is a chronological element to this. I think this chronological window of opportunity may be worth calling out early in the piece? The short-term expediency (Olympics, Fukuda, LTTA and BIT anniversary) is meeting some long-term shifts that are increasing economic incentives (namely, climate change and trade desires) with the possibility of allowing the hot economic relations to thaw the cold political ties.

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Author: Shiro Armstrong

I’ve been following Japan-China relations pretty closely for a while now and hearing some murmurs from Chinese officials that this year could bring a big new agreement. I blogged on this in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter blog during Hu Jintao’s visit to Tokyo. Hu Jintao’s visit did a lot to bring the countries closer but probably not as much as the picture below.

The earthquake disaster in Chengdu has arguably done more to bring the international community together than the Olympics will. How about for Japan-China? Apparently this photo below is having a huge positive effect in China, as one would imagine . . .

Japanese rescue members pay respects to the bodies of the female victim Song Aimei and her 70-day old baby after 16 hours of searching through the debris in Qingchuan County, Sichuan Province.

The full article is from the Xinhua news agency. There are other articles praising Japanese and other rescue efforts but I don’t think any would speak as loud as the picture above.

Update: here is another powerful image