Economic hopes plagued by hostility

Most members of the Chinese public support economic cooperation with Japan, but their Japanese counterparts hold competing views, a major poll in both countries showed.

The poll showed that 62.9 percent of the Chinese public supports the idea that "the two economies are highly complementary, and they can cooperate and achieve a win-win situation", compared with 58.6 percent last year.

However, when the Japanese public were asked about Sino-Japanese economic ties, 47.1 percent of them believed that "the two economies are competing with each other and it is difficult for them to build a win-win relationship", an increase from 42.8 percent last year.

The figures were part of the latest results of the 10th Public Opinion on China-Japan Relations 2014 survey, co-sponsored annually by China Daily and Japanese nonprofit think tank Genron NPO, released in Tokyo on Tuesday. The annual poll, conducted this year in July and August, included 1,539 Chinese residents in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and 1,000 members of the Japanese public.

Tokyo's strategic hostility against China is one of the major factors behind the differing views about economic cooperation, observers said.

Bilateral trade suffered a heavy blow after the Japanese government unilaterally announced the decision to "nationalize" part of China's Diaoyu Islands in September 2012, which prompted nationwide protests and boycotts against Japan.

Sino-Japanese trade last year slumped 5.1 percent year-on-year, and China's imports from Japan dropped by 8.7 percent in the same period, according to China's General Administration of Customs.

Yang Bojiang, deputy director of the Institute of Japan Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said one of the major factors behind the change is that the balance of power between Beijing and Tokyo has been shifting in the Asia-Pacific region.

Japan's defense white paper 2014, released by its Defense Ministry in early August, again labeled China as a major threat.

The annual paper fully embraced Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's explanation that exercising collective defense does not run contrary to Japan's war-renouncing Constitution, calling the move "historic".

Wang Xinsheng, a professor of Japan studies at Peking University, said that Japan's hostile security policies against China were phased in as the Cold War ended and China's economy boomed.

Japanese international relations scholars and mass media often define China's "replacing Japan as the world's second-largest economy in 2010" as a turning point.

"Such a regional big picture perspective has prompted some hidden problems between China and Japan to emerge and become explicit," Yang Bojiang said.

In return, bilateral economic cooperation has continued to suffer. Japanese investors cut their investment in China for the first seven months of this year to $2.83 billion, down 45.4 percent year-on-year, said Shen Danyang, spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

The drop is much sharper than the slump in China's overall FDI for the same period - 0.35 percent.

Although the two countries continued their cooperative agenda for the economy and trade, "the friendly atmosphere has shifted toward an air of friction, confrontation and even conflicts" in the context of politics, security, territorial and historical issues, Wang Xinsheng said.

Liu Jiangyong, vice-dean of the institute of modern international relations at Tsinghua University, warned that a historical tragedy of bilateral conflict may be rerun.

The key lies in the policymaking of Japanese leaders and how the Japanese nation transforms itself, Liu said.

(China Daily 09/10/2014 page4)