By Dune Lawrence and Bradley K. Martin
July 7 (Bloomberg) -- When Hu Jintao arrives on Hokkaido island today as a guest of the Group of Eight leaders, it will be his second time on Japanese soil in two months -- after a decade in which China's top leader stayed away.
Since Hu's May meeting with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a Japanese warship docked in China for the first time since World War II, the two nations agreed to jointly develop a disputed gas field and China invited Japanese rescuers to aid victims of the Sichuan earthquake.
The developing relationship between Asia's largest economies has implications for their neighbors and around the world. ``Most countries in Asia are somewhat uncomfortable with China's reemergence,'' says Steve Tsang, a fellow in modern Chinese studies at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, U.K. ``If the Chinese can actually make China-Japan relations stable, it's very successful diplomacy.''
Reassuring Asian nations that China's rise needn't pose a security threat might also call into question the need for a U.S. counterweight. About 80,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea and Japan to provide a buffer against North Korea and China, both of which have nuclear weapons.
``Good relations with China, then with South Korea, then with North Korea, that would change the international situation surrounding Japan's security policy,'' says Koichi Kato, a lawmaker for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a former defense minister. ``That would have very strong implications for U.S.-Japan relations.''
Partners, Not Rivals
During his May visit, Hu, 65, urged the nations to strive for mutual strategic trust. ``Japan and China should recognize each other as partners, not as rivals,'' he said in a speech at Tokyo's Waseda University.
They have much to gain from a thaw. The two countries' economies are increasingly interdependent: China is already Japan's largest trading partner, with bilateral commerce surpassing 27 trillion yen ($253 billion) last year. Japan's exports to the world's fastest-growing major economy have more than tripled since 2000.
In addition, China's outreach reflects the government's desire to use the Olympic Games in Beijing next month to showcase its peaceable credentials, which were tarnished by its suppression of March demonstrations in Tibet and disruptions to Olympic torch ceremonies in London and Paris.
`Tentative'
So far, the improvement in relations remains ``tentative,'' says Ezra Vogel, the former head of Harvard University's Asia Center and now a professor emeritus. ``I don't think we're yet at the stage where there is popular support in China for good relations with Japan, or confidence in Japan that relations are stable and completely trustworthy.''
Still, any improvement is noteworthy, as much because of the two nations' shared, tortured history as because of their economic importance.
Japan occupied China between 1931 and 1945, a brutal period epitomized by the Nanjing massacre of 1937, when Japanese troops sacked the city for six weeks. The Chinese government estimates that more than 300,000 people were slaughtered; a 1948 war-crimes tribunal in Tokyo concluded that at least 155,000 people died.
As recently as a year ago, a group of lawmakers from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party stirred a diplomatic dispute when they said they were ``unable to confirm the facts of a massacre'' and called on China to remove photos displayed at war museums in Nanjing and elsewhere.
Loath to Apologize
Such incidents have cemented in the Chinese mind an image of Japan as a nation loath to acknowledge and apologize for its conduct -- an image reinforced for decades by the Communists who came to power in China in 1949.
``Japan was demonized in state education as a way of shoring up the sagging legitimacy of the Communist Party, which took credit for defeating the invaders,'' says Jeffrey Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo.
The chapter on the occupation in a Chinese high-school history study guide first published in 2004 has a section entitled ``Japanese Soldiers' Heinous Crimes.'' It ends by noting, ``Guarding against the revival of Japanese militarism and fascism remains one of the most important problems that we face.''
In April 2005, tens of thousands of Chinese marched on Japan's Shanghai consulate, hurling rocks and paint bombs, to protest new Japanese textbooks they said glossed over wartime atrocities. A September 2006 Pew Global Attitudes survey found that 81 percent of Chinese respondents said Japan hasn't apologized enough for its World War II conduct.
Impediment
China's leaders, though, may see such attitudes as an increasing impediment to their plans for developing the economy and increasing the nation's international influence.
``There's a growing sense in China that Beijing needs a good relationship with Japan to do what it wants,'' says Brad Glosserman, executive director of Pacific Forum CSIS, a Honolulu-based research institute. ``A more congenial leadership in Japan, one that doesn't deliberately offend Chinese sensitivities, makes that possible.''
China has found some of that congeniality in Fukuda. Unlike his predecessors, the 71-year-old prime minister has promised not to visit Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine, where convicted war criminals are among those memorialized, and which China and South Korea say symbolizes Japan's militaristic past. During a trip to China in December, Fukuda said the two countries had a ``historic opportunity'' to improve relations.
Soccer and Basketball
Last month's five-day visit by the Japanese destroyer ``Sazanami'' to the southern Chinese port of Zhanjiang yielded news accounts of sailors playing tug-of-war, soccer and basketball with crew members from the Chinese warship ``Shenzhen.''
Of more substance was the June 18 accord to jointly develop natural-gas fields in the East China Sea, setting aside a four-year argument between Asia's biggest energy consumers over who owned the reserves. Japan had complained that efforts by Cnooc Ltd., China's biggest offshore oil producer, to tap the Chunxiao field would have siphoned off gas from its side of a boundary line.
While it's hard to gauge public reaction in China's controlled society, not everyone is thrilled about the rapprochement. Hours after the gas accord was announced, a person identified as ``Deliberate Blogger'' on the Sina.com Web portal declared ``This is not only giving in, it's a mistake and a humiliation in the long course of history of our generation.''
Unworthy of Respect
Another blogger, Gelu 1989, said in a June 20 post: ``I oppose Japan in my bones, because a country that doesn't respect history isn't worth my respect.''
Kenneth Lieberthal, who was director for Asia on the White House National Security Council during Bill Clinton's presidency, says the U.S. has an interest in improved Chinese- Japanese relations -- to a point.
While the U.S. wants to promote regional stability and a united front in dealing with North Korea, a resolution of all outstanding differences might allow China and Japan to combine to limit American influence in Asia, he says.
Lieberthal, now an Asian scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, sees little chance of that happening. ``This is not about to become a warm and fuzzy relationship,'' he says. ``That degree of closeness is not in the cards.''
A panel of Chinese and Japanese scholars, set up in 2006 in an attempt to reconcile their versions of history, may provide a barometer. Shinichi Kitaoka, a professor of diplomatic history at the University of Tokyo who heads the Japan team, says the group plans to publish a report by the end of August that presents each side's account of historical events and counter-critiques.
``We never expected to come to an agreement on our interpretations in this first round,'' Kitaoka said in an interview in Tokyo. ``We agreed to disagree, which in itself is a success.''
To contact the reporters on this story: Dune Lawrence in Beijing at dlawrence6@bloomberg.netBradley K. Martin in Tokyo at bmartin18@bloomberg.net or
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