Due to Japanese leaders' visits to Yasukuni Shrine this year witnessed an unbalanced development of the Sino-Japanese relations. Whichever relation made a detour from the problem of Japanese leaders' visit to the Shrine continued to develop while that unable to get away from the problem met with big obstacles. The fact indicates on the one hand that behind the Sino-Japanese relation there exists a motive force that is unshakable by the will and belief of the people, an objective driving force. This force, fundamentally speaking, is the requirement of the advanced productive forces, a requirement of the fundamental interests between the peoples of the two countries. And on the other it has also indicated that the present Sino-Japanese relation is quite abnormal and therefore, it requires greater and timely efforts to be made by the leaders of the two countries, the two governments and the peoples of the two countries. And in 2004, the Sino-Japanese relation once again experienced a very ruffled and quite an abnormal year.

On the 1st of last January, Junichiro Koizumi, Japanese Prime minister paid his 4th visit to Yasukuni Shrine, casting a dark shadow over the Sino-Japanese relation for a whole year. Due to the problem of Japanese leaders' visit to the Shrine the mutual visits of Sino-Japanese leaders have stopped for more than three years with the political relation between the two countries to become colder and colder. In the meantime, the Sino-Japanese trade marched forward at a giant stride. The year of 2003 saw the trade value of the two countries to exceed 130 billion US dollars, hitting an unprecedented growth scale. The year of 2004 will see it to make another step upward with an expected value of 160 billion US dollars. For a consecutive 10 years Japan has been the first trade partner of China, and in last May the EU after its eastward expansion came to be the first trade partner of China but Japan remains still the biggest source country for the imports of China while China is the largest source country for Japan's imports. For Japan at present the US remains to be its biggest trade partner but statistics show that China will become Japan's biggest economic partner in not too long a future. In the meantime the direct investment of Japanese enterprises in China see a continuous expansion. Up to the end of last October the Japanese invested projects reached 31,000 in China with an actual input of 46.1 billion US dollars. To put the actual input in order Japan is next only to China's Hong Kong SAR and the USA, numbering the 3rd in the world from which China absorbs its foreign capitals.

The ceaseless expansion and favorable development of Sino-Japanese trade relation indicates the superiority of the Sino-Japanese economy remains complementary to each other without any weakening and on the contrary has become more outstanding now. The development of the Sino-Japanese economic trade has its objective necessity, and especially China's joining of the WTO has exerted a big impetus on the Sino-Japanese economic and trade relations. And obviously the development trend of the Sino-Japanese economic and trade relations has presented a sharp contrast to the lethargic situation of the Sino-Japanese political relations.

Under a lethargic circumstance of Sino-Japanese political relation the exchanges between the local governments and economic groups of the two countries continue to expand. A number of local leaders of China paid visits to Japan one after the other, thus pushing ahead the economic cooperation with the local areas of Japan. The friendly cities formed between the two countries have come to 226 pairs in all. And the exchanges between the parties of China and those of Japan have become quite vigorous too. In September, the Japanese councilors who visited China reached 115 in all (of whom 54 are from the Liberal Democratic Party and 51 from the Democratic Party). For Japan's political party in office and that out of office to form a large group to visit China together it's the first time in the history of the Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations. Now, an exchange channel between the Chinese Communist Party and the Japanese party in office and the party not in the office has been formed or in the course of being formed.

Some new phenomena have also occurred in cultural exchanges between the two countries. Last June saw a large Japanese sumo delegation come to China for a visit and a Japanese film week was held in Beijing in September and both of them achieved success. In the regional cooperation of the "10 plus 3", namely China, Japan and the ROC and the six-party talks on the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsular China and Japan have strengthened the cooperation in a harmonized way, indicating that the two parties have more interests in common in the regional and international affairs instead of reduction. "The multilateral is above the bilateral and the regional higher than the bilateral", and not to bring the bilateral differences into the multilateral and regional cooperation this has become a tacit understanding between the two countries.

However, the extreme abnormality of the Sino-Japanese relations is daily producing a more negative influence. The lethargy in the political situation began to affect and hinder the economic and trade relations of the two countries with the tendency of economic and technical problems being politicized to become serious. Recently, quite some discussions have come to be heard in Japan about the stopping of the Japanese Yen loans to China. This cannot but be regarded as having something big to do with the abnormal relations of the two countries. In the Chinese homeland, the decision making of some large-scale projects possible for mutually beneficial in Sino-Japanese cooperation has been affected and hindered by the popular feelings. These are the acknowledged facts known to everybody. Just as some experts point out, if the Sino-Japanese political relation is not cold as seen today it is entirely possible for the two countries to have signed several large-scale projects of economic cooperation that cater to the development trend in the 21st century and with economic exchanges to become more vigorous.

The historical problem and the realistic one (for instance the dispute in the waters of the East China Sea) is something like to "pour fuel over the fire", leading the antagonistic feelings among part of the two peoples to become more sentimentalized. Some overexcited behaviors, (such as the assault by Japanese right-wingers at the Chinese Consulate in Osaka and the unfriendly actions of some local Chinese football fanciers against the Japanese football team and so on) are no good for the development of the relations between the two countries. In the field of energy-supply and exploitation, which should be able to have become a big "platform for cooperation" between the two countries, there has come to occur some complicated tendency of economic benefit to be entangled with the dispute on sovereignty. Under such a situation in which the two countries seriously lack of mutual belief in political field there exists the danger in which the accidental occurrences lead to the happening of serious strategic misunderstanding between the two countries.

Not long ago when meeting Koono Yohe, speaker of the House of Representatives President Hu Jintao expressed the problem of Japanese leaders' visits to the Yasukuni Shrine was a critical matter deserving a proper handling. The longer the problem drags on the bigger the injury to the feelings of the peoples of the war-victim countries including China among them, nor would it be good for the improvement and development of the relations between the two countries. In November when meeting Junichiro Koizumi, Japanese Prime minister, Hu Jintao stressed once again, the crux of the difficulties in political relation between the two countries lay in the problem of Japanese leaders' visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. It was our hope that the Japanese side would deal with the problem in a proper way. Hu Jintao pointed out, to develop a long-term and stable and good neighborly and cooperative Sino-Japanese relation means something more important and realistic today than in the past. The two parties of China and Japan, especially the leaders of the two countries should actively promote the relations of the two countries to go forward steadily and healthily from a strategic and long-term point of view.

Next year marks the 60th anniversary for the victory of the people of the world in their anti-fascist war. The sensitive year is the one in which the Sino-Japanese relation is going to experience an ordeal of "either to move forward or to draw back". To make the year of 2005 an opportune year in which we won't see a further deterioration in the Sino-Japanese relation but to be a year for the relation to "rise instead of falling" the great efforts are utterly needed to be made by the leaders, the governments and the peoples of the two countries and to be made speedily and in time as well.

By People's Daily Online