China and Japan were scheduled yesterday to hold their first security talks in Beijing in more than two years, with North Korea's missile and nuclear programs on the agenda.
"The meeting is for Tokyo and Beijing to share their basic security and defense policies and philosophies with each other," an official of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's China division in Tokyo said.
"Talks will surely include issues of North Korea's missile launches and six-party talks, but the chief objective is to develop mutual understanding," he said.
The official also said that Japan would request that China improve the transparency of its military budget expansion.
The meeting was agreed to by both countries' foreign ministers in May on the sidelines of an Asian forum in Qatar, amid a slight easing in tensions between the perennially feuding neighbors.
China and Japan have held nine security meetings since 1993, although the last one was in Tokyo in February 2004.
China has scaled back senior official encounters with Japan primarily over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honors 14 World War II criminals among 2.5 million war dead.
Senior foreign and defense officials that planned to attend yesterday's meeting included Tsuneo Nishida, deputy minister at the Japanese foreign ministry, and Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei (
A Japanese embassy official in Beijing said the talks were scheduled to start at 3pm.
North Korea's test-firing of ballistic missile tests on July 5 were expected to be one of the top items on the agenda during yesterday's talks.
Japan had urged fellow UN Security Council members to support a binding resolution that would impose sanctions on the North for launching the missiles.
But China strongly opposed the measure in favor of diplomatic negotiations. A watered-down version that dropped a reference to sanctions or military action was finally passed.
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