(May. 5, 2008)

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and Chinese President Hu Jintao are likely to agree during their talks scheduled for Wednesday on building a framework for alternating annual visits by leaders of the two countries, Japanese and Chinese government sources said.

The Japanese and Chinese governments hope the planned regular visits will become a symbol of the strategic and mutually beneficial relations that they have vowed to strengthen. The agreement is expected to be incorporated in political documents that Fukuda and Hu are scheduled to announce after the talks Wednesday, the sources said.

Hu will visit Japan from Tuesday to Saturday. It is the first time in a decade that a Chinese leader has visited Japan, the last being former Chinese President Jiang Zemin in November 1998.

During the summit talks Wednesday, Fukuda and Hu are expected to agree on enhancing the mutually beneficial political, economic and cultural ties between the two countries.

The two leaders likely will incorporate building a mechanism for regular reciprocal visits by leaders as one of the main pillars of their agreement, the sources said.

The Japanese and Chinese governments are in the final stages of coordinating plans for the leaders of the two nations to alternately visit each other at least once a year, excluding visits for occasions such as international conferences including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

Although visits by Japanese and Chinese leaders continued at a pace of once every two to three years after the two countries normalized diplomatic relations in 1972, they were not previously placed on a regular political schedule because of various diplomatic issues stemming from such incidents as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and a row over the content of Japanese history textbooks.

Visits by Japanese and Chinese leaders to each others' countries were suspended for five years after then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited China in October 2001 mainly due to China's objections to Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.

Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Beijing in October 2006 soon after taking office in September in a bid to patch up strained bilateral relations. Subsequently, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited Japan in April the following year, the first visit by a Chinese leader in 6-1/2 years.

Fukuda, who considers promoting good relations with other Asian countries a high priority, and South Korean President Lee Myung Bak agreed on regular reciprocal visits between the two countries during Lee's two-day visit to Japan last month.

On historical issues, the documents are likely to eschew such terms as "apology" or "remorse" in favor of such expressions as "squarely looking at history and moving toward the future," according to the sources.

The document also will likely use language in which China praises Japan's postwar history as a peaceful country while Japan praises China's reform and policy of openness and the two countries' mutual respect for each others' efforts.