Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a meeting on Thursday confirmed their intention to maintain interaction at all levels in order to build constructive and stable relations between the countries
TOKYO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th November, 2022) Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a meeting on Thursday confirmed their intention to maintain interaction at all levels in order to build constructive and stable relations between the countries.
The meeting took place on the sidelines of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok. It was the first face-to-face between the leaders of Japan and China in three years. The talks lasted 36 minutes.
"There was a common view on supporting cooperation in areas such as environmental protection and medicine, which could benefit both sides and contribute to the resumption of private sector exchanges," Kishida said after the meeting.
Kishida said that he expressed concern to Xi about the situation in the East China Sea, including in the area of the disputed Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu Islands in China, stressing the importance of stability in the Taiwan Strait. In addition, the Japanese leader called on his Chinese counterpart to lift restrictions on the import of Japanese products into the country as soon as possible.
After World War 2, the Senkaku Islands went under the control of the United States and were passed on to Japan in 1972. China rejects Japan's sovereignty over the islands. Japan believes that China's territorial claims over the islands followed the discovery of valuable minerals in their shelf waters in the 1970s.
The territorial dispute escalated in 2012, when the Japanese government purchased three of the five islands from a private owner, thereby confirming the country's affiliation with the islands.
In 2018, relations between Tokyo and Beijing improved after the visit of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to China, during which he met with Xi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. The leaders reached an agreement to launch an incident prevention mechanism in the East China Sea starting June 2018, which involved the creation of an emergency communication line to avoid accidental armed clashes in the air and at sea.
