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BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping has congratulated new Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, state media reported Wednesday, the day after he took office in Tokyo.
Relations between the countries have worsened as China builds its military presence around disputed territories in the region, and as Japan boosts security ties with the United States and its allies.
Xinhua news agency said that Xi on Tuesday told Ishiba he hoped the “neighbors separated by a strip of water” could find common ground to “build a constructive and stable” relationship.
“It is in the fundamental interests of the two peoples to follow the path of peaceful coexistence, friendship for all generations, mutually beneficial cooperation and common development,” Xi told Ishiba, according to Xinhua.
Japan and China have had diplomatic relations for more than 50 years, but the key trading partners have seen ties sour significantly.
Beijing last week reacted angrily and lodged a complaint with Tokyo after a Japanese warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait for the first time.
The United States and its allies are increasingly crossing through the 180-kilometer (112-mile) Taiwan Strait to reinforce its status as an international waterway, vexing China.
Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said China was “highly vigilant about the political intentions of Japan’s actions.”
Japan’s new Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya said on Wednesday that Tokyo also wanted a “constructive and stable relationship” with China based on common interests.
But “what we need to assert will be asserted,” and “as a major country, we seek China to behave responsibly,” said Iwaya, who was nominated by Ishiba on Tuesday.
“We are seeing attempts to unilaterally change the status quo in the East Asia region, so we need to build a system that can firmly deter such attempts,” Iwaya added.
The minister said he hoped to meet his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi “as soon as possible” for “frank exchanges and dialogue,” but a date had not yet been decided.
Nerves are running high in Japan on national security matters following the first confirmed incursion by a Chinese military aircraft into Japanese airspace in August.
A Chinese aircraft carrier also recently steamed between two Japanese islands near Taiwan for the first time, and the fatal stabbing of a Japanese schoolboy in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen has further frayed ties.
Ishiba, 67, visited Taiwan in August and backs the creation in the region of a military alliance along the lines of NATO, with its tenet of collective defense.
He outlined his policies at a news conference late Tuesday, warning that “the security environment surrounding our country is the most severe since the end of World War II.”
Beijing and Tokyo were at loggerheads last year after Japan began discharging treated water from the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean — an operation the UN atomic agency said was safe.
But the release generated a fierce backlash from China, which branded it “selfish” and banned all Japanese seafood imports.
However, China last month said it would “gradually resume” importing the seafood.