Bill Emmott
Japan’s opportunity to improve relations with China
One of the biggest problems facing Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is how to get on better with the neighbours. That is why he visited both Seoul and Beijing barely a week after starting his new job. Japan’s relations with China and South Korea deteriorated badly under his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, as disputes over history and territory flared up, outweighing the boom in trade and investment between the three and preventing any summit-level meeting between Mr Koizumi and Chinese leaders since 2001. But can Mr Abe really do any better? He has been a habitual visitor to the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo that is held to symbolise Japan’s lack of contrition over its 20th-century history, and is on record as having questioned the legitimacy of the Tokyo war-crimes trials of 1946-48.
Simply not being Mr Koizumi will be a helpful start. Unlike his predecessor, Mr Abe has remained carefully evasive about whether he will visit the war shrine while he is prime minister; for Mr Koizumi it was a campaign promise that he dared not break. And having taken over the job in September, Mr Abe will have almost a year for diplomacy before the August 15th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945, a day on which the domestic pressure to visit Yasukuni will become intense. There will, however, be a number of sensitive anniversaries for him to navigate during the year, for 2007 will be the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war. On July 7th 1937 there was the so-called “Marco Polo Bridge incident”, when an alleged kidnapping of a Japanese soldier just outside Beijing triggered Japan’s attempt to take control of the whole of northern and eastern China. And December 13th marks the 70th anniversary of the notorious “rape of Nanking”, when Japanese soldiers ran amok in what was then China’s capital, with a resulting death toll of somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000.
Those anniversaries will be difficult moments in Sino-Japanese relations. But they could also provide Mr Abe with opportunities. As an affirmed nationalist, he may be the Japanese politician best able to blend contrition about the past with forthrightness about present-day issues. In his October 2006 summit with the Chinese leaders, he found a good way to do this by agreeing to set up a joint commission, involving Japanese, Chinese and perhaps other historians, to study 20th-century history and make recommendations, such as about school textbooks or even about the Yasukuni shrine itself. If he were to make this study serious rather than just a gesture, it would neatly defer arguments about the details of history until well beyond Mr Abe’s premiership.
An even likelier tactic will be to try to change the subject. If Mr Abe wants to look forthright in the face of Chinese bullying, he would be better served by focusing on the two countries’ dispute over oil and gas reserves under the East China Sea, in which Japan’s territorial claim is at least as well founded in international law and precedent as China’s, rather than tussling over history and apologies. An appeal to international arbitration would be one way to deal with the territorial dispute; another would be to propose that separate negotiations be held over the local Senkaku/Diaoyutai islets and over the undersea resources, which is how disputes in the South China Sea between China, Vietnam and the Philippines have been eased.
Trade would also be a good thing to talk about. Whereas political relations have been frosty, trade and investment ties have been red-hot: the two countries are each other’s second-biggest trading partner. Even as Japanese businessmen were complaining that Mr Koizumi’s shrine visits threaten their chances in China they were increasing their stock of foreign direct investment in China by almost 30% in 2005-06. China, Japan and South Korea are all enjoying the benefits of an increasingly integrated Asian economy.
What Asia lacks, however, is a proper regional free-trade agreement, to reduce barriers further and to manage disputes. Both China and Japan have muttered about initiating such an agreement in recent years, but they disagree about who should take part in it and what goods and services it should cover. Mr Abe is likely to attempt to revive the idea of a regional agreement, casting its proposed membership as far to Asia’s south and west as India. Just as in 2005 Japan succeeded in making India, along with Australia and New Zealand, a founder member of the first “East Asia Summit” in Kuala Lumpur, so in 2007 it will want to make India an ally in discussions over regional free trade. Indian membership could be tempting for some South-East Asian countries, and would be strongly backed by the United States too, which likes the world’s largest democracy to take part in Asian regional organisations, chiefly because it would prevent China from dominating them. Which is exactly why China opposes it.
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