CHINA - JAPAN
Calls for better ties as Japan-China summit opens
Wednesday 07 May 2008
Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda pledged on Wednesday to hold regular summits in the future as talks aimed at bolstering cooperation between the two got underway.
Wednesday 07 May 2008
By AFPThe leaders of Japan and China agreed Wednesday to hold regular summits to improve relations after a long freeze caused by disputes over wartime history.
In a joint statement, Chinese President Hu Jintao also hailed Japan for its "peaceful" role in the world since World War II, a sharp change of tone from some previous summits focused on the past.
"The two nations agreed that Japan and China both share larger responsibilities for the world's peace and development in the 21st century," said the statement signed by Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.
"Leaders of the two states will develop ways for regular exchanges, with one leader visiting the other in principle every year," it said.
China refused all high-level contact with Japan for five years until 2006 in anger at then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to a Tokyo shrine that venerates Japanese war dead including war criminals.
Hu's visit to Tokyo was the first by a Chinese head of state in a decade and only the second ever.
"China takes a positive view of the more than 60 years since the war during which Japan has developed into a peaceful state and contributed by peaceful means to the world's peace and stability," the joint statement said.
The tone was sharply different from the last Tokyo summit in 1998, when then president Jiang Zemin sparred with his hosts over whether Japan had adequately apologised for its aggression before World War II.
The joint statement made no direct mention of Japan's past aggression.
It also did not address a continued dispute between Asia's two largest economies over contested gas fields in the East China Sea.
The joint statement also said that the two countries will work together to draft a new treaty on fighting global warming after the Kyoto Protocol's commitments run out at the end of 2012.
There are no reactions so far.
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IN THE FIELD
FRANCE 24's Nathalie Thourret reports from Tokyo. 06/05 3pm GMT+2
