TMCnet News
Japan envoy urges need for transparency in China defense spending+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)TOKYO, March 30_(Kyodo) _ Japan's new Ambassador to China Yuji Miyamoto on Thursday urged China to be more transparent in its defense spending, citing the opaque nature of Beijing's military expenditures. "It is inevitable that China needs to increase its military transparency for acceptance by the international community," Miyamoto, who was appointed last month as ambassador to China, said in an interview with Kyodo News. "The non-transparency in military (spending) is the reason why China's image, for the most part, comes out (to the international community) negative," Miyamoto said, adding that he hopes to urge China to take a positive step toward increasing disclosure of its defense spending and convince the country that such move would be "beneficial" to it. Miyamoto meanwhile denied the argument that China poses a threat to Japan, questioning whether the country can be called a potential threat. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso in a news conference in December sparked outcry from China when he said China was beginning to pose a "considerable threat." China is "a neighbor with 1 billion people equipped with nuclear bombs and has expanded its military outlays by double digits for 17 years in a row, and it is very unclear as to what this is being used for," Aso had said. "It is beginning to become a considerable threat." Miyamoto's most pressing job is to help mend bilateral ties, which have deteriorated due to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the war-related Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo since the premier assumed office in 2001. Koizumi's most recent shrine visit was in October last year. China, which suffered Japanese aggression from 1931 to 1945, criticizes Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni where 14 Class-A war criminals are enshrined along with Japanese war dead. Miyamoto, a China expert and career diplomat who once served as a minister at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, said Japan and China should continue working-level talks such as the one designed to resolve a dispute over gas exploration rights in the East China Sea despite a halt in top-level talks. "It is unnatural for diplomacy as a whole to be stagnant just because of one problem," Miyamoto said and called for a mechanism to avoid this. |