China: Abe´s Britain-Germany comparison inappropriate CCTV News - CNTV English
Full video: Chinese FM Wang Yi addresses World Economic Forum CCTV News - CNTV English
China Thursday refuted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's recent
appeal for more transparency in China's military budget, stating that it
is Japan that should increase transparency and explain its own military
buildup.
"China's defense policy is transparent and has been
published in its white papers and on other occasions," foreign ministry
spokesman Qin Gang on Thursday told a regular press briefing in response
to Abe's speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a
day earlier.
"We must ... restrain military expansion in Asia,
which could otherwise go unchecked," Abe told the annual meeting of
global business and political leaders, following his government's custom
of not naming China in such references.
In response, Qin urged
Japan to explain to Asia and the international community the real
purpose of amending its pacifist constitution, which has been in
existence since 1947. The Abe government has been trying to revise it so
as to greenlight the expansion of Japan's military forces.
In
December, Abe's cabinet approved a critical defense policy package
comprising new defense program guidelines, a five-year defense buildup
plan and the national security strategy. Japan vowed to seek more
"proactive" roles for its military forces abroad and to set new
guidelines on arms exports, signaling a major shift from its previous
restrictive stance.
"Abe tends to depict China as a threat at
whatever occasion he attends. His purpose is to worsen Sino-Japan
relations and damage China's image in the international community, as
well as tear apart economic development in the Asia-Pacific region," Lü
Yaodong, a research fellow of Japanese politics at the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
During the Davos
speech, Abe also called for dispute resolution through "dialogue and the
rule of law, and not through force and coercion."
Qin said that
Japan cannot on one hand refuse to admit mistakes and continue to
denigrate China, and on the other hand indulge in empty rhetoric to
advocate dialogue, as it is the Japanese leader that is shutting the
door to dialogue.
Liu Jiangyong, a vice director of the Institute
of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, said it is
inappropriate for Abe to cast blame for political issues at an economic
forum.
"Abe is trying to distract people's attention by claiming it is others' fault," Liu told the Global Times.
Abe
also defended his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, saying that the shrine
honors the dead of World War I and the 1868 Meiji war, not just war
criminals or others who died in World War II.
Chinese Foreign
Minister Wang Yi, who is currently attending the international
conference on Syria in Montreux, Switzerland, described Abe's argument
as futile, which only serves to expose Abe's erroneous perception of
history.
Even today, the Yasukuni Shrine still represents the
notion that the aggression of Japan in World War II was "just," the
Pacific War Japan launched was "self-defense" and the trial at the Far
East International Military Tribunal was "illegitimate," as well as
honoring 14 Class-A war criminals, Wang noted.
South Korea
Thursday also said that it is a complete contradiction to talk about
forging friendly ties while continuing visits to the shrine.
Liu said Abe is unlikely to change his stance even though he sensed the pressure and isolation from the international community.
"His explanation reveals that he doesn't think he's wrong and he would do it again," Liu said.
Tensions
between China and Japan have been rising since Tokyo announced in
September 2012 the "nationalization" of the Diaoyu Islands in the East
China Sea.
Chinese air force planes have been regularly
patrolling the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ),
which covers the Diaoyu Islands, air force spokesman Shen Jinke said
Thursday.
On a recent patrol, multiple Chinese aircraft were sent
to "monitor, identify, track and warn" multiple foreign military planes
that had entered the ADIZ, established two months ago, Shen added.
By Zhang Yiwei Global Times
China, Japan open German front in diplomatic war
BEIJING (Jan 25, 2014): One hundred years
after the outbreak of World War I, China and Japan are ripping selected
pages from Germany's history -- including the Nazi period -- as they
seek to demonise each other in their modern-day diplomatic battles.
Beijing's state-controlled media have compared Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe to Adolf Hitler, using shrill rhetoric that analysts
say exploits Tokyo's mixed messages about its past aggression in China
and elsewhere.
At the same time, they urge him to emulate Germany's post-war contrition for the evils of Nazism.
Abe, for his part, has raised the spectre of 1914, saying at the
World Economic Forum in Switzerland that relations between Japan and
China resemble those of Britain and Germany as they stumbled towards
war.
Tokyo and Beijing are locked in an increasingly acrimonious row over
small, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that Japan controls but
China regards as its territory, with their militaries warily eyeing
each other.
Commentators have likened China, a rising power, to Germany in the
early 20th century and portrayed the islands as Sarajevo, site of the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that triggered the Great War.
In Davos, Abe pointed out that war broke out in 1914 despite strong economic relations between Germany and Britain.
"I think we are in a similar situation. We don't want an inadvertent
conflict arising between these two countries," he told reporters.
China's foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang roundly rejected the
simile Thursday.
"Actually in history China was already a major country
in the Tang and Song dynasties (from the seventh to the 13th centuries),
so there is no so-called 'China is becoming a major country'," he said.
"There is no need to make an issue of the Britain-Germany relationship."
Hitler's DNA
Chinese officials have lashed out at Abe since his December 26 visit
to the hugely controversial Yasukuni shrine, which honours 2.5 million
Japanese war dead including 14 senior war criminals described by Qin as
"the Nazis of the East".
The shrine is seen in China and South Korea as a symbol of Japan's
20th century military and colonial aggression which saw the country
occupy a large swathe of East Asia, often to brutal effect on civilians
and prisoners of war.
In what analysts see as crude propaganda, the overseas edition of the Communist Party mouthpiece
People's Daily headlined an article "Hitler's DNA in Abe", illustrated with a mock-up of Japan's leader gazing up at the Fuhrer.
The
Global Times tabloid, in its English edition, this week
carried a cartoon of Japan's national flag with the sun symbol in the
centre dripping blood and a swastika imposed.
"You could say it's propaganda," Torsten Weber, an expert in modern
East Asian history at the German Institute for Japanese Studies in
Tokyo, told
AFP.
"It is a way to distort history and it's also a way to distract
attention from more pressing problems that, for example, China faces."
Chinese media have also tried to compare Abe unfavourably with how Germany faced up to Nazi atrocities.
The official Xinhua news agency urged him to follow the example of
West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who fell to his knees at a monument
to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- a brutally crushed 1943
revolt by Jews in the Polish capital facing deportation to the Nazi
death camps.
- AFP
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