China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee on Feb. 24 announced that the annual assemblies of the National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Conference would be postponed until further notice.
This means that it is not possible to say with certainty that the spread of COVID-19 will be contained in the short term and that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot legitimately make any international visits.
Whether considered from the perspective of the epidemic or domestic Japanese dissatisfaction with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Xi, it also means that Japan can no longer receive Xi and give him the full state visit treatment.
The question is why Beijing waited until March 5 before reluctantly giving in to Japan’s decision to postpone Xi’s visit.
China first had the idea of Xi making a state visit to Japan in the middle of the cherry blossom season, and the plan was confirmed in June last year when Xi and Abe met at the G20 summit in Osaka.
The visit was to be part of a series of events planned by Beijing over the past two years to improve China-Japan relations. Beijing had positioned Xi’s planned visit as the climax of the normalization of relations, and Xi and Abe were expected to celebrate the coming of a new era of Sino-Japanese relations.
An official visit by Xi also holds a deeper meaning directly linked to a diplomatic strategy that China has been updating over the past few years. Japan has neither curbed a “nationalizing” of the Tokyo-controlled Senkaku Islands — which Taiwan calls the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) and Beijing refers to as the Diaoyu Archipelago (釣魚群島) — in the East China Sea, nor stopped expanding its defense force, and continues to strengthen its defense deployments on the Ryukyu Islands.
The strategic reason for China still being willing to improve relations with Japan under these circumstances is that it wants to counteract the effects of the new “cold war” between China and US by ending any joint US-Japan efforts to contain China.
Over the past few years, China has also found itself surrounded by diplomatic enemies. Beijing’s hardline approach in the South China Sea has become the main cause of friction with neighboring countries. The Belt and Road Initiative has also led to concerns that the Chinese government is engaging in debt-trap diplomacy and political infiltration.
Hong Kong’s unprecedented pro-democracy protests and Taiwan’s re-election of a Democratic Progressive Party administration also highlight the complete failure of Beijing’s policies for Hong Kong and Taiwan.
China’s handling of the Xinjiang region and Tibet has also raised considerable international concern.
Beijing desperately needs to use its friendship with Japan to break through its isolation in the international community. Not only does it hope to break through the Indo-Pacific strategy jointly created by the US, Japan, India and Australia to contain China, it also hoped to use Xi’s state visit to Japan to change the international community’s negative impression of China.
However, because Xi’s visit had to be postponed, Beijing’s long-established diplomatic strategy has been disrupted.
The improvement of Japan-China relations over the past two years has been characterized by Chinese activism and Japan going with the flow.
The reason Abe has been willing to take an open and positive attitude toward this development is that he hopes to fully restore bilateral visits by Japanese and Chinese officials, not to mention the diplomatic pull and standing in history that the achievement would bring Abe and his administration.
However, the continued spread of COVID-19 has resulted in the Abe administration’s crisis management to be questioned.
The Japanese government’s plan to give Xi — “the world’s biggest dictator” — a high-profile state visit has sparked public opposition. Those opposing it include conservative members of the Japanese parliament who are close to Abe; political figures in Japan’s second-largest political party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan; Japan’s third-largest party, the Democratic Party for the People; the National Democratic Party; and the Japanese Communist Party.
The virus started in Wuhan, China, and has spread to Japan and the rest of the world. The Japanese public has been critical of China and even demanded accountability from Beijing for having concealed the outbreak in the beginning.
In short, the conditions and atmosphere that led to Xi’s planned visit have deteriorated, making Japanese more cautious, which is why Abe told Chinese Communist Party Central Foreign Affairs Commission Director Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) at a Feb. 28 meeting that Xi’s visit “must bring sufficient results.”
State visits to Japan by Xi’s two predecessors did not bring positive results. During his visit in 1999, then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) was criticized by Japanese for talking about “historical issues” at a welcome banquet hosted by the Emperor of Japan.
Although then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) visited Japan in 2008, during the administration of Yasuo Fukuda, who valued Japan-China relations, Japanese were critical of China’s handling of an incident with poisonous dumplings that spread to Japan, riots in Tibet, chaos surrounding the Olympic torch relay, and the development of oil and gas fields in the East China Sea.
Now that China has agreed, on Thursday last week, to announce the postponement of Xi’s visit to Japan, Beijing’s wishful thinking has fallen short, although China continues to hope that the visit will simply be postponed until this fall.
However, as the coronavirus spreads, Japanese attitudes toward China are worsenng.
Postponing Xi’s visit until the fall might not make it any more likely to happen.
John Lim has a doctorate in law from the University of Tokyo and is a former associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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