Speech lauds Tokyo’s relations with Beijing

When Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier, faced Japan’s parliament and TV audiences in both countries on Thursday, he reached for the weightiest of similes to argue that friendship would prevail in long-troubled ties between Asia’s pre-eminent powers.

“Your country has a saying: Even when the wind blows, the mountain does not move,” Mr Wen told the Japanese lawmakers, in the first speech to the Diet by a Chinese leader in 22 years.

“Although the development of ties between China and Japan has gone through wind and rain and twists and turns, the basis for friendship between the people of these two countries is as unshakeable as Mount Fuji or Mount Tai,” he said.

But while the carefully considered warmth of Mr Wen’s address demonstrated the determination of both Beijing and Tokyo to improve ties, his Japan trip has made clear the difficulty of turning their rhetorical rapprochement into action.

Most of the Sino-Japanese agreements reached this week have involved expressions of good intentions rather than detailed plans. An accord signed by Nippon Oil and China National Petroleum on Thursday, for example, looks short on solid commitments.

A “consensus” on “active participation” in a future international framework on climate-changing gases also sidestepped the crucial issue of whether China might agree to accept curbs on its own carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, Mr Wen fended off a request from Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, for support for Japanese permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council with a mere pledge to talk about it.

Anyone looking for the beef in the deals might be disappointed to find it only on the menu of the banquet organised by Mr Abe for Mr Wen: China has yet to agree to Tokyo’s calls to resume beef imports, although it did lift its four-year-old ban on Japanese rice.

The vagueness and narrow scope of this week’s agreements do not mean Mr Wen’s trip has been a failure, however. Unlike the disastrous 1998 trip to Japan by then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin, which left bilateral relations in worse shape than before, Mr Wen has avoided getting bogged down in disputes over Japan’s brutal invasion and occupation in the 1930s and 1940s.

The rapprochement between the two countries has a significance beyond north Asia. Before Mr Abe came to office last September, Washington made it clear it wanted better relations between Asia’s two giants.

In a speech this month welcoming what he said was the changed regional atmosphere following Mr Abe’s groundbreaking trip to Beijing and Seoul last year, Thomas Schieffer, US ambassador to Tokyo, said: “It’s a good thing for Japan. It’s a good thing for us. It’s a good thing for China. It’s a good thing for South Korea. And we applaud [Japan’s] efforts to do that.”

The breadth of what Mr Wen and Mr Abe have agreed to strengthen co-operation on is in itself an expression of political will. And while they failed to make any substantive progress on a vexing dispute over territory in the gas-rich East China Sea, they did set an autumn deadline for more junior officials to hammer out a compromise.

The creation of a “high-level economic dialogue”, planned exchanges by defence and foreign ministry officials and co-operation on energy and the environment all carry the hope of practical benefits to come.

In a hectic three-day schedule, Mr Wen is also seeking to show a different face to Japanese tired of Chinese hectoring over history. In his itinerary he included a photographer-friendly tai chi session on Thursday in a park close to Mr Abe’s home, and a baseball workout on Friday.

“The trip seems to be successful so far,” said Jin Linbo, senior fellow of China Institute of International Studies. “The leaders on both sides are . . . sending a message to the people of both sides that bilateral relations are very important.”

By expressing forthright approval for past Japanese apologies for Tokyo’s wartime deeds, Mr Wen’s Diet speech also challenged the perceptions of Chinese who feel their former enemy has never properly apologised.

One area where there have been plenty of specifics is in promotion of wider people-to-people exchanges. Japan is to send 20,000 people to 19 Chinese cities this year to celebrate the 35th anniversary of normal relations. It will also invite 6,000 young Chinese to Japan each year for the next five years and send 1,000 a year to China.

For all Mr Wen’s faith that the basis for bilateral amity is as solid as Japan and China’s most famous mountains, he said true reconciliation could come only through greater contact between Chinese and Japanese young people. “Large-scale youth exchanges”, the premier said in his speech, “plant the seeds of hope for friendship between future generations.”