Premier Li Keqiang of China has met with a visiting Japanese friendship delegation, in a sign of the increasing thaw between the neighbors after more than two years of political tension.
On Thursday, Mr. Li, the second-highest-ranking Chinese leader, held talks with members of the 21st Century Committee for China-Japan Friendship, a government advisory body made up of retired diplomats and scholars. The members of the Japanese delegation, led by Taizo Nishimuro, had arrived in Beijing on Wednesday and met with their Chinese counterparts, headed by Tang Jiaxuan, a former Chinese State Council member.
During Thursday’s meeting in Beijing, Mr. Li told the group that the “healthy and stable growth” of bilateral relations was “of vital importance” to both countries as well as the region, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Mr. Li also said that moving forward required “the spirit of drawing lessons from history,” but did not address a continuing territorial dispute in the East China Sea directly, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported, citing a Japanese government official.
The encounter was made possible by a breakthrough meeting between the leaders of the two countries on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Beijing last month. Despite that short and rather frosty encounter, a symbolic handshake between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has paved the way for the resumption of high-level talks between Asia’s two leading economies.
Divergence over the handling of historical issues, accompanied by China’s increasing assertiveness on the world stage, has dogged ties between the two countries. China sees Japanese leaders as being inadequately remorseful over Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, and relations took a turn for the worse in September 2012 after Japan nationalized a rocky group of islands in the East China Sea that both China and Japan claim.
Protests in China subsequently broke out in several cities, aimed at Japan, and coast guard ships from the two countries circled one another continuously around the disputed islands, called the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. Relations declined further in December 2013 when Mr. Abe visited a controversial shrine in Tokyo where Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals, are honored.
In another sign that relations are on the mend, the two countries are set to resume a high-level conference on energy conservation this month in China, a Japanese official said Friday.
The Japan-China Energy Conservation Forum will take place in Beijing, but the exact location and date have yet to be decided by the two sides, said Mr. Hisamori, an official at the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, who declined to give his full name.
Although it had been held annually since 2006, the meeting did not take place last year because the “Chinese side said it was not ready to have the meeting,” Mr. Hisamori said.
During a meeting of the friendship group Wednesday, Mr. Tang, who presided over the group and also heads the semiofficial China-Japan Friendship Association, again pointed to the importance of history to bilateral ties as he said that China, along with Japan’s other Asian neighbors, will be “paying a great deal of attention to how the Japanese government and leaders will handle next year and what kind of message they will transmit.”
It will be a significant opportunity for Japan to “achieve real reconciliation with its Asian neighbors” by re-examining history, Mr. Tang said.
Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the Chinese government has said it will organize a series of events to commemorate the anniversary, which it also calls the World Anti-Fascist War and Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. The memories of Japan’s brutal invasion of China are often replayed in Chinese news media, particularly during times of political tension.
Included in the commemorations will be a new documentary on the war that was created by the state-run China Radio International and China’s State Archives Administration.
Called “Today in the History of War Against Japanese Aggression,” the series is composed of five-minute episodes spanning the years 1931 to 1945 and will be shown daily online and on TV, according to the archives spokesman, Mr. Yang.
The series will rely on mostly new material, some of which has never been seen. It will remind Chinese viewers not only of the Sino-Japanese war but also of “China’s contributions to the anti-fascist war,” Mr. Yang said.
An earlier version of this article misstated the year of a visit Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan made to a war shrine in Tokyo. Mr. Abe visited the shrine in December 2013, not December 2012.