Foundation must be safeguarded to break bilateral ‘bottleneck’

Lack of trust still haunts the political relations and security between China and Japan, Chinese Ambassador Cheng Yonghua said in Tokyo on Thursday.

The distrust has created a “bottleneck” in bilateral ties, Cheng said at a party for observing the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the two countries.

Though the national feelings between the two peoples are getting better, he warned that the momentum remains fragile and some complicated and sensitive factors have frequently emerged.

“To solve this bottleneck, the two sides need to abide by the four political documents and the four-point principled agreement, and manage their divergences and contradictions constructively,” Cheng said.

Before the meeting between President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Beijing in 2014, China and Japan reached a four-point principled agreement to improve bilateral ties, in which the two sides agreed to resume political, diplomatic and security dialogues while acknowledging different positions on the Diaoyu Islands.

The Chinese ambassador called the two countries to safeguard carefully the political foundation of their ties and expand ceaselessly the people-to-people exchange, adding that they should perceive each other objectively and rationally and try to have a correct knowledge of each other’s identity.

Representatives of seven Japan-China friendship groups attended the ceremony.

Yohei Kono, president of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade, said the bilateral economic relations have been improving on a step by step basis.

Kono, a former Lower House speaker and former chief cabinet secretary, is the father of Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.

Shoji Muneoka, chairman at Japan China Economic Association, hoped that the economic growth of Japan and China will help push the people-to-people exchange forward when this year marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the two countries.

Muneoka is chairman of Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp.