BEIJING: China has sharply criticised Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for telling a US newspaper that Beijing had a “deeply ingrained” need to challenge neighbours over territory, state media said yesterday.
Abe, visiting the United States for talks with President Barack Obama, told the Washington Post in an interview published on Thursday that China uses disputes with Japan and others to shore up its domestic support.
Tensions between the Asian giants are growing over rival claims to a group of small islands in the East China Sea that the Chinese call the Diaoyus and the Japanese refer to as the Senkakus.
Beijing is also at odds with several Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, over islands in the South China Sea.
China’s confrontational stance risked eventually harming its economy and scaring off foreign investors, Abe said.
“Such behaviour is going to have an effect on their economic activity at the end of the day,” the paper quoted him as saying.
“In the case of China, teaching patriotism (is equivalent to) teaching anti-Japanese sentiment,” he added.
Beijing fired back, with foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei saying Chinese officials were “shocked” at the comments, according to the state-run Global Times newspaper.
“It’s rare that a country’s leader would brazenly distort facts, attack its neighbour and instigate confrontation among countries in the region,” it quoted Hong as saying.
China was demanding a clarification and explanation over the comments, he added.
Japan administers the uninhabited islands, though China and Taiwan also claim them. The dispute has simmered for decades but tensions rose last year after Tokyo nationalised those islets in the chain it did not already own.
China responded angrily, with violent street demonstrations damaging Japanese businesses and property, and some Japanese citizens reporting being harassed and physically attacked.
Beijing and Tokyo have both scrambled jets to ward off moves by the other side and fishing boats and government patrol ships have played cat-and-mouse in the vicinity of the islands.
Earlier this month, Tokyo alleged that a Chinese frigate locked its weapons-targeting radar on a Japanese destroyer in what it characterised as a dangerous escalation. Beijing denied the charge.
AFP
