Warming China-Japan ties won't hurt Taiwan: forum

Relations between China and Japan have entered a new era marked by "pragmatic diplomacy," but Taiwan won't be negatively impacted by a warming in relations between China and Japan, international relations experts in Taipei said yesterday.

In a forum hosted by the Taiwan Thinktank a day after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's (溫家寶) ground-breaking visit to Japan, Taiwanese academics and think tank officials said China and Japan have turned a corner in their often rocky relationship, as Wen touted his trip a "success" in rejuvenating ties with Tokyo.

In the first address by a Chinese leader to Japan's parliament in more than two decades, Wen called for friendship and understanding between the two countries, whose economic ties have strengthened dramatically in recent years. China is Japan's No. 1 trading partner.

"This `ice-melting' trip," Asia-Pacific Relations Association director Luo Fu-chuan (羅福全) told the forum, "marks the advent of `pragmatic diplomacy' between Japan and China."

While the two countries recognize that their economic ties are so cemented it is no longer feasible to shy away from cooperating on many fronts, their positions on historical and territorial disputes remain the same, he explained.

"China knows it can't change Japan's positions, and vice versa, but they know they have to work together," he added, referring to the two nations' divergent interpretations of wartime history and their territorial disputes in the Pacific.

So what does all the melting ice between Japan and China mean for Taiwan?

Not much, panelists said.

"There isn't anything that surprises us about this trip," Academia Sinica researcher Lin Cheng-yi (林正義) said.

Japan will still seek to uphold the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and seek closer cooperation with regional democracies like India to hedge against China's rise, he said.

Closer Sino-Japanese ties in this case don't equate to any less support for Taiwan from Japan, he added.

Taiwan's democracy still gives it a great amount of currency with other democracies in the region, which appear to be coalescing in a "value-oriented" alliance, even as they make efforts to improve ties with China, other specialists at the forum chimed in.

"Not much has changed for anybody in the region strategically [as a result of Wen's fence-mending trip], but at least the ice isn't getting any thicker," Taiwan Thinktank director Luo Chi-cheng (羅致政) said.