Notwithstanding their consolidated political positions, Xi Jinping and Shinzo Abe have been unable to return Sino-Japanese relations back to the level of the pre-nationalisation of the Senkaku Islands. Will their meeting this month change that?
THE FIRST Sino-Japanese Summit since 2011 will be held later this month.
Over the last seven years, President Xi Jinping has consolidated his position at the apex of power in China by ending term limits, installing Xi Jinping Thought into the CCP’s Constitution, and pushing forward with his signature policy, the Belt and Road Initiative.
Importantly, he has also placed himself at the head of the most important Leading Study Groups (LSG) and holds the key titles of Chairman of the Military Commission, the President of China and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has similarly consolidated his position by being elected for a third time as president of the Liberal Democratic Party.
This has paved the way for him to become the longest-serving post-World War II Japanese prime minister. Through his tenure, he has won four elections, passed a Collective Self Defense legislation and presided over a sustained economic growth cycle executed under the rubric of ‘Abenomics’.
Notwithstanding their consolidated political positions, Xi and Abe have been unable to return Sino-Japanese relations back to the level of the pre-nationalisation of the Senkaku Islands .
In China, sustained anti-Japanese rhetoric, highly personalised attacks on Abe, and a narrative that Japan was part of a US-led containment strategy, have complicated efforts to return Sino-Japanese relations back to what Abe calls “ their normal state ”.
Similarly, regular incursions into Japanese controlled waters by Chinese naval and merchant vessels, island building and militarisation of those islands in the South China Sea (SCS), the unilateral declaration of an Air Defence Identification Zone, and the rejection of the July 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision, have only re-enforced views in Tokyo that China is a revisionist state bent on re-establishing a Sino-centric regional order.
For Beijing, the resurrection of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (also known as ‘the Quad’), Tokyo’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy, and the joint statement by the US, Japan and the EU on pushing back against non-market economies (read China), all are evidence that Japan and the West are attempting to keep China down.
Beijing sees such actions as part of a strategy to prevent it from achieving its 2025 Made in China ambition, as well as its twin goals of ‘ socialist modernisation ’ by 2035, and by 2049 to have built “a modern socialist country that is strong, prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious”.
