Tue, July 17, 2012
By Zhao Wei, Sina English
Japan's ambassador to China returned to Beijing on Monday after Japan's Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba summoned him on July 15 mandating him to report on the situation of Japan-China relations, according to Japan's Kyodo News Agency.
This marks a new spasm to the strained bilateral relations.
In the meantime, Japan's forthcoming white paper on defense warns that China's military is playing a stronger role in decision-making in Chinese foreign policy due to some change in its relationship with the Communist Party in recent years, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
The 2012 white paper, which is expected to be submitted to the Cabinet later this month, cites international analyses on "increasingly complex relations between the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the People's Liberation Army," alluding to the rising influence of China's military in foreign policy decisions.
The white paper is the first to include such an analysis on China, indicating Japan's raising alarm over China's military. The paper also hyped up "concerns that China's decision-making processes are becoming increasingly opaque with the military's rise," a development it says poses a crisis management issue that merits due attention.
To support these concerns, the paper also cites data showing that China's defense spending has ballooned about 30-fold in 24 years.
It also notes that China's development of aircraft carriers is in full swing and that naval ships have been appearing more frequently in the Pacific Ocean, including waters around Japan. The analysis said China is trying to improve its marine deployment capabilities.
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