BEIJING — Striking an upbeat note, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan said Tuesday that he believed his country and China had taken a major step forward in repairing relations, and that from now on there should be frequent dialogue between them.
Mr. Abe, speaking in public for the first time since he met on Monday with China’s president, Xi Jinping, said that for the sake of the Asia-Pacific region, the onus was on both countries to work toward a “mutually beneficial” relationship based on strategic interests.
“Japan and China, we need each other,” Mr. Abe told a news conference here at the close of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, attended by leaders of 21 countries. “We are, in a way, inseparably bound together.”
After the meeting between Mr. Abe and Mr. Xi, which was intended to defuse tensions that had threatened to set off conflict and had inflamed nationalist sentiments in two of Asia’s wealthiest countries, the nations put different spins on the outcome.
Mr. Abe, in his search for the positive, said there should be “dialogue again and again.”
In contrast, the Chinese news media, while showing a more moderate attitude toward the territorial dispute that erupted more than two years ago over islands in the East China Sea, continued assigning blame.
Pointing the finger at Japan, the state-run news agency Xinhua quoted Mr. Xi as saying, “Severe difficulties have emerged in Sino-Japanese relations in recent years, and the rights and wrongs behind them are crystal clear.”
Mr. Abe said he had requested that Mr. Xi push forward plans for a hotline connecting the two countries to help prevent their vessels in the East China Sea from getting dangerously close to one another.
The crisis over the islands, known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan, began in September 2012 when the Japanese government purchased them from a private owner.
The Chinese, who claim the islands were wrongfully taken from them by Japan at the end of the 19th century, sent squadrons of paramilitary vessels into the waters around the islands, and Japanese Coast Guard boats fended them off in what became a cat-and-mouse game.
In the past several months, the tensions on the seas have moderated as quiet talks on developing the hotline began.
At his news conference, Mr. Abe said that he had held a “tête-à-tête” with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during the forum, and that they had discussed concluding a Japanese-Russian peace treaty in time for the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2015.
Even as China and Russia draw closer, the relations between Japan and Russia have also developed, prompted by a mutual desire to stop China from becoming a regional superpower, analysts say. A peace treaty would help bind the two countries as a balance to China’s rise.
In the last few months, Russian and Japanese diplomats have been working on ending a territorial dispute over the Kurile Islands, known as the Northern Territories in Japan, which the Soviet Union secured near the end of World War II. Japan claims them as its territory.
A resolution of that dispute would pave the way for a formal World War II peace treaty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/world/asia/japan-china-xi-jinping-shinzo-abe-meeting.html?_r=0
@TaiShang , @Chinese-Dragon , @Edison Chen , @Genesis