Key choices await Japan

Relations between China and Japan are closing the year at a crossroads and just which path they take－for a cooperative partnership or a downward spiral－hinges more on the actions taken in Tokyo, experts say.

For some observers, the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties next year may help focus minds in Japan on the importance of a long-term perspective in shaping the bilateral relationship.

"To people, 50 years give more yesterdays than tomorrows but to countries, 50 years means just a beginning," says Yu Qiang, a professor at the University of International Relations in Beijing.

Yu says that although Japan's new government has made some positive gestures toward China, there have been growing uncertainties in the relationship resulting from the opinions advanced by right-wing elements in the country.

Fumio Kishida, after being elected president of the Liberal Democratic Party in September, secured an unexpected majority for the LDP when he led the ruling party as prime minister into a general election in October. Voting was for the House of Representatives, the lower－and more powerful－of the two chambers in the country's legislature, called the Diet.

The expectations had been that the going would be tough for Kishida in the election. Almost all the media commentary and opinion polls suggested that the outlook for the LDP was far from bright before the election. Kishida took up the reins of the party from Yoshihide Suga at a time when the longtime aid of Shinzo Abe had resigned just a year into the top job.

Suga was an unpopular leader due to his handling of the country's COVID-19 outbreak and was blamed for the failure of so-called Abenomics, a stimulus program that took its moniker from Japan's longest-serving prime minister and which was meant to revive the country's stagnant economy.

Against this backdrop, Kishida began his premiership with an approval rating of just 45 percent. The opinion polls handed him the third-worst debut rating among nine prime ministers since 2002. Even worse, that was 20 percentage points lower than what Suga managed when he took office.

It didn't help that the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, or CDPJ, teamed up with several parties, including the Japanese Communist Party, to introduce unified candidates in the October election. The strategy resulted in tight races in many constituencies.

Undaunted, Kishida secured for the LDP 261 seats in the 465-seat lower house of parliament, down from the 276 the party held before the election. Still, that was enough for the party to control almost all the parliamentary committees and to push through any contentious legislation without help from its coalition partner Komeito.

The result appears all but certain to guarantee Kishida a tenure of at least three years as LDP president and up to four years as prime minister, before the next parliamentary election must be held.

"A fortuitous decline in the COVID-19 infection rate in Japan before the election and Kishida's strategy of introducing what he calls new capitalism, which places special emphasis on income redistribution, contributed the most to the election result," Yu says.

According to the scholar, Kishida's new capitalism has, to some extent, defanged the CDPJ's claim that Abenomics has widened Japan's income gap. Then came the rapid increase in the vaccination rate from 40 percent of the population to 75 percent in just two months－another factor that surely helped Kishida.

High vaccination rate

Japan now has one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates among major economies. An average of 115 infections a day was reported last week, representing a plunge of about 99 percent from the peak in August. That progress has enabled the country to lift virtually all restrictions on its economy.

In terms of Japan's relations with China, Yu points out that Beijing was quick to send friendly signals to Tokyo after Kishida got his new government underway. Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a message congratulating him on his election as Japan's prime minister, and Xi was among the first world leaders to hold a phone conversation with Kishida upon his taking office.

In their conversation, Xi said China stands ready to work with Japan to enhance dialogue and cooperation, and promote the building of a "Sino-Japanese relationship that meets the requirements of the new era in the spirit of taking history as a mirror and opening up the future".

"At present, the Sino-Japanese relationship faces both opportunities and challenges," Xi said, adding that China and Japan should earnestly learn from both the positive and the negative experiences in bilateral relations, strictly observe the principles set out in the four political documents between them, and effectively implement the political consensus that they are cooperative partners and not threats to each other.

In response, Kishida said Japan is willing to work with China to draw important lessons from the history of bilateral relations, and take the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to make joint efforts in building a constructive and stable Japan-China relationship that meets the requirements of the new era.

"The phone call created positive momentum for developing bilateral ties but a growing right-wing sentiment among Japanese lawmakers and in Kishida's government has cast a shadow on the Sino-Japanese relationship," Yu says.

Provocative actions

Since Kishida took office, right-wing lawmakers have taken a series of provocative actions to sabotage the friendly environment for relations between China and Japan, including meddling in China's domestic affairs in regard to the Taiwan question, hyping up the "China threat" and tensions relating to the Diaoyu Islands issue, the scholar says.

He also cites tensions arising from the government's increased military budget, along with some lawmakers' fabrication of "China's human rights problem".

Most recently, concerns were raised when about 100 Japanese lawmakers, including nine vice-ministers and special aides in Kishida's cabinet, prayed at the Yasukuni Shrine on the 80th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and days before China's National Memorial Day for the victims of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.

The shrine, which honors 14 Class-A convicted war criminals among 2.5 million Japanese war dead from World War II, is regarded as a symbol of Japan's past atrocities and militarism. Its Yushukan, a war museum inside the shrine, espouses Japan's right-wing narrative of the war, which portrays Japan as a victim of the war and contends that the country was forced into the Pacific War because of a Western economic blockade.

Days before, Abe, who remains a hugely influential figure in Japan's parliament and heads the largest faction in the LDP, made the comment that "a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency" during a virtual forum organized by a Taiwan think tank.

Given that Japan had colonized the Chinese island for half a century, Abe's remark aroused a fierce backlash from Beijing, which immediately summoned Japan's ambassador in Beijing to express its displeasure with the provocative comment.

In response to Abe's remark and the shrine visit, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said: "Several decades on, some in Japan are still denying and even beautifying the history of aggression and colonial rule.

"History cannot be denied and travesty of justice cannot be tolerated", said Zhao, adding that the "Japanese side should adopt a right attitude, deeply reflect upon the Japanese militarism' fascist atrocities and crimes against humanity and win trust from people around the world with concrete actions".

'Fundamental interests'

Yu reads something else into the timing of the Yasukuni visit.

"The date of the shrine-visit by lawmakers also showed that Japanese nationalists are not as closely aligned with Washington－Tokyo's wartime nemesis but postwar ally－as the latter might hope," he says.

"Despite all these wrongdoings, it is widely hoped that Japan can quickly come back to the right track of maintaining and developing friendly and cooperative relations with China, because it is in line with the fundamental interests of both countries and their people."

Yuzo Tanaka, a professor of economics at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, believes that it should be trade and the potential for economic cooperation that dominate the headlines for interactions between China and Japan, rather than political tensions and rivalry on the security front.

"The Japan-China economic partnership is one of the biggest in the world. Their output combined together accounts for more than a fifth of that of the globe," Tanaka says.

"The two economies are deeply complementary, with different levels of industrial and technological capability that generate business and investment on a scale not matched in any other part of the world."

He said it is regrettable to see that the geoeconomic potential arising from a closer relationship is yet to be fully realized due to political enmity and unresolved historical issues.

Yu says a shared interest in the promotion of prosperity should be recognized and that China and Japan have achieved some interdependence in the region despite being held back by politics. However, the development of a deeper economic relationship requires a climate in which political confidence can grow at the top echelons of government in both nations.