TOKYO (Reuters) - Leaders
from China and Japan will likely agree to work together to help maintain
stability on the Korean peninsula following the death of North Korean ruler Kim
Jong-il when they meet next week, but anything more than platitudes will be hard
to come by.
Japanese Prime Minister
Yoshihiko Noda will meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing
during a two-day trip from Sunday as the world waits to see where North Korea
is headed under Kim Jong-un, the youngest son of the destitute nuclear state's
late leader.
Noda's visit to China, North
Korea's biggest backer, was arranged before Kim Jong-il's death was announced
by the unpredictable hermit state on Monday.
"Instability on the
peninsula would be in nobody's interest," said Sun Cheng, professor of
Japanese studies at the China University of Political Science and Law in
Beijing.
"The six-party talks are
likely to be on hold for some time, and so is any progress on the North Korean
nuclear issue, but there'll be a consensus between China and Japan -- as well
as the United States, South Korea and Russia -- on preserving stability on the
Korean peninsula."
The six-party denuclearisation
talks, involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia,
broke down in 2008 and United Nations inspectors were expelled from North Korea
in 2009.
Ensuring stability and
establishing working relations with the impoverished nation is especially
important for Japan, which is well within range of North Korea's long-range
missiles and wants Pyongyang to resolve the emotive issue of the fate of
Japanese citizens kidnapped to help train spies decades ago.
"It goes without saying
that China can play an important role in solving abduction issues. Naturally,
we will be working hard on China (to help settle the problem)," Japanese
Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba told reporters on Thursday.
THE ROAD TO PYONGYANG
Experts agree China has the
biggest role to play in efforts to keep North Korea on an even keel. Japan's
ability to act is limited by the feud over the abductees and historical
animosity born of Tokyo's 1910-1945 colonisation of the Korean peninsula.
"The road to Pyongyang is
through Beijing right now," said Richard Samuels, director of the
MIT-Japan Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"I'm sure the Japanese
side will implore the Chinese side to use their good offices to help North
Korea find a way to be more Burmese," he said, referring to Myanmar, whose
new civilian government has pledged to re-engage with the world community.
Promises of any concrete steps
on North Korea, however, are unlikely to emerge from the Sino-Japanese summit.
"Of course they will make
comments like 'We will maintain close communication for the sake of the
peninsula's stability' but not much more than that," said Hiroko Maeda, a
research fellow at PHP Institute's Center for International and Strategic
Studies in Tokyo.
"No one knows how the
situation in the North will develop."
North Korean worries aside,
Noda and Chinese leaders are expected to try to improve ties between the
world's second- and third-largest economies, strained by a maritime dispute
last year that chilled relations deeply.
But major breakthroughs appear
unlikely.
"THREE FEET OF ICE"
"Overall, Noda's visit
will be an opportunity to improve relations. But we should not have excessive
expectations," said Huang Dahui, professor specializing in Sino-Japanese
relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
"In Sino-Japanese
relations we say that it takes more than one cold day for three feet of ice to
form ... We can't expect that one visit will give relations a total
remake."
Sino-Japanese ties deteriorated
last year when Japan detained a Chinese skipper whose trawler collided with
Japanese patrol boats near a chain of disputed islands in the East China Sea.
The area is potentially rich in gas and oil reserves.
The leaders are expected to
discuss ways to restart stalled talks on the proposed joint development of gas
fields in the East China Sea and to achieve an early start of negotiations for
three-way free trade talks among Japan, China and South Korea.
On the financial front, Japan
is in talks to buy Chinese government debt to strengthen economic ties, and
Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi said this week the matter needs to be
addressed at the summit meetings.
Kiyoshi Takenaka | Reuters
(Additional reporting by Linda
Sieg in TOKYO and Chris Buckley in BEIJING)
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