‘Warm Spring’ Greets Hu-Fukuda Summit, but Tensions Persist

On Saturday, Hu Jintao concluded the first state visit by a Chinese president to Japan in almost a decade. President Jiang Zemin traveled to Japan in 1998, but the subsequent deterioration in relations between Beijing and Tokyo severely curtailed high-level meetings. Although Chinese and Japanese officials managed on this occasion to finesse such recently contentious issues as Tibet and food safety, Hu’s May 6-10 sojourn failed to resolve the deeper sources of these earlier bilateral tensions. Before Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Beijing in October 2006, the Chinese government had frozen high-level summits with Japanese leaders outside the […]