That empty expression President Xi Jinping of China made when he shook hands with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan was his blandest face of the entire APEC summit last month. It was their first meeting, and it lasted only 25 minutes.
And yet it was a turning point in relations between China and Japan, especially after renewed tensions over the East China Sea islands that both states claim as their own — known as the Senkaku in Japanese, and the Diaoyu in Chinese. In fact, the Chinese government had expressed such an outcry over that disagreement in recent months that it would need quite a good excuse to justify to the Chinese public having any direct contact with Japan’s prime minister. Hence the strict, lopsided conditions Mr. Xi set before meeting with Mr. Abe last month: Japan would have to formally acknowledge there was a territorial dispute between the two countries, and Mr. Abe would have to promise to no longer visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Class A war criminals among Japan’s war dead.
But just before the summit the two sides reached a cleverly crafted agreement conveniently open to multiple interpretations. It stated that China and Japan hold different views about their recent tensions in the East China Sea — allowing the Chinese side to claim to its people that Japan had formally acknowledged the existence of a dispute, as Mr. Xi required, while allowing the Japanese government to tell its own audience back home this wasn’t so. (Yasukuni was not mentioned.)
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