By Feng Zhaokui (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-16 07:41

President Hu Jintao's state visit to Japan last week, dubbed "the spring warmth trip" by the Japanese and Chinese press, was a complete success.

A friend of mine and a reporter for the weekly magazine Chubun (Chinese Review) in Japan, told me in a letter, "I have been covering President Hu's trip for the past few days and the mood of this visit has been very good".

A Japanese professor wrote in a letter, "President Hu's visit to Japan has left a very good impression among the Japanese public. Some of the media outlets in Japan that tried to play down its significance have changed their tone completely. The Japanese people who have been friendly to China are filled with great joy. I have to say President Hu does it best. My hat's off to him!"

After President Hu's Japan visit, some of my colleagues began thinking about "how China and Japan should keep the spring warmth" and how China can maintain the achievements of his Japan trip so as to prevent various problems from upsetting the Sino-Japanese relations again. On this I would like to share some of my thoughts with the readers.

The key for China and Japan to retain the spring warmth lies in their ability to forge a strong relationship. By relationship I mean "ties" in two senses: strategic ties between the two nations and emotional ties between the two peoples.

People still remember that China-Japan relations were very good in the years from the start of China's reform and opening-up in 1978 through the whole 1980s. "China-Japan friendship" was not only a slogan that won people's hearts but was also reflected in their actions.

For example, the Great Get-together of Chinese and Japanese Youths in 1983 remains a wonderful memory for both nations. Many of those who took part have become leading long-time promoters of China-Japan (Japan-China) friendship.

Though some problems and frictions occurred between the two countries at that time, the Sino-Japanese ties overall were kept well and stable. If one has to sum up the fundamental reason for that memorable period in one sentence, it is because of the strong ties existed between China and Japan back then.

In terms of national strategic ties, the Japanese side believed at that time China's reform and opening-up "serves Japan's national interest"; therefore the Japanese government supported China's reform efforts by such means as official development aid. Numerous facts since then have shown through the fast development of bilateral trade between the two countries that China's reform and opening- up in the past 30 years have brought both nations a period of win-win situations.

Apparently China's economy would not have grown so fast nor would the Sino-Japanese economic relations have developed so fast had China maintained a planned economy. This means China was right to pursue reform and opening-up and Japan was right to support them. The two countries supported each other over China's reform and opening-up, which constituted one of the strategic ties between them.

In terms of "sentimental ties between peoples", exchanges of personnel between the two countries' political and business circles and those promoting friendship have increased gradually since the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and Japan in 1972, especially since the beginning of China's reforms. Such exchanges have expanded to the grass-root level, involving large numbers of students, as the frequency of people-to-people exchanges rose sharply.

With a 2,000-year history of friendly exchanges, it felt like old friends meeting again after years of no contact when the two peoples were able to mingle after frozen political ties were thawed. For some Japanese people who witnessed "the terrible things Japan had done in China" with the war of aggression during World War II, their sense of remorse made it particularly necessary to show friendliness toward the Chinese people in time of peace.

In the 1990s, the all-important "national strategic ties" between China and Japan expired when the Cold War ended, while China's fast economic growth and the matching increase of national strength led some Japanese to feel "pressured" or even "threatened". As a result, the voices of support for China's reform and opening-up were gradually drowned by those demanding "containment of China's development".

As for the "sentimental ties between the two peoples", they were overshadowed by a kind of "clash of feelings" as people paid more attention to the other's shortcomings and problems as contacts between the two nations increased.

Meanwhile, the generation of Japanese youths who were born after the war but were never told the truth about it grew up and became elites of the post-war Japanese society. A small number of right-wingers in Japan took advantage of the younger generation's ignorance about that dark chapter in history and went out of their way to deny and distort history, which also hurt the Chinese people's feelings. Years of erosion of the "sentimental ties between the two peoples" finally culminated in the Sino-Japanese political relationship freezing between 2001 and 2006.

The current leaders of the two nations knew only too well how important the development of friendly ties is to both countries. They also appreciated the significance of recognizing that "China and Japan are partners in cooperation and pose no threat to each other". That's why they worked hard to make the "ice-breaking", "ice-thawing", "spring-ushering" and "spring-warmth" trips possible between the two countries.

However, it will take equally persistent wisdom and efforts to etch the gist of the fourth political document, inked by President Hu and Prime Minister Fukuda earlier this month in Tokyo, into the minds of the two peoples. And only by doing so can we hope to truly overpower the erroneous theory that views China as a "potential enemy" of Japan and even the Western world as a whole, as is currently being propagated by some media outlets there.

The most important task at the moment is to forge new ties between the two countries. For "national strategic ties" it is necessary to let everybody learn by heart the consensus that "China and Japan are partners in cooperation" and the top threat to the two nations, or the whole world for that matter, is climate change and environmental pollution.

That's why President Hu Jintao repeatedly emphasized that further enhancing cooperation between China and Japan in the area of energy conservation and environmental protection is the "ultimate highlight" of the bilateral relations.

The fourth political document between the two countries, signed during President Hu's Japan visit, also states, "It is our obligation to posterities and the world community at large to intensify cooperation in energy conservation and environmental protection".

It means cooperation in energy and environmental protection is not just another area in bilateral trade and exchange but a strategic issue linked to the (non-traditional) national security. The question "whether the human race can survive" is causing widespread concern among the two peoples as well as in the international community.

There exists between the two peoples not just "the issue of reckoning history" but "reckoning the reality" as well, together with the presence of a so-called "media curtain" that misleads the public in its own country with untrue, subjective and unfair coverage of the other nation. The phenomenon has been particularly pronounced in the current run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games in August.

To overcome this obstacle it is necessary to increase direct contacts between the two peoples by leaps and bounds so as to help them know each other's country better. The Chinese side in particular should bring back the spirit of the years when up to 40,000 and even 50,000 Japanese high school students were invited to visit China on "learning tours".

Such efforts naturally lead to the issue of the media's influence in creating the image of the other country and people in its own readers' and audiences' minds. And the media of both countries should increase contact and improve mutual understanding of each other.

Last but not the least is a note regarding the tendency among some media outlets in both countries to play up the shortcomings and problems emerging from the other country's development. There is no better way of correcting it than "doing our own jobs well".

The author is a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

(China Daily 05/16/2008 page9)