Japan PM set to visit for high-level dialogue

Aso is scheduled to meet President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during his two-day trip starting Wednesday, the conservative premier's first full state visit to Beijing since he took office last September.

At the top of the agenda when the leaders of Asia's two economic powerhouses meet will be the global downturn, which has driven Japan into its worst post-war slump and slashed China's once staggering growth rates.

The International Monetary Fund last week predicted that Japan's economy, Asia's largest, will shrink by 6.2 percent in 2009, and it cut its economic growth forecast for China, Japan's top trade partner, to 6.5 percent.

On the regional security front, Aso and his communist hosts will discuss North Korea's recent rocket launch over Japan, and the isolated regime's threat to resume its nuclear weapons program.

Japan, with its ally the United States, has been at the forefront of international efforts to punish the Pyongyang regime, while China has taken a softer line on the fellow communist state on its southern border.

Despite the serious challenges facing both China and Japan, the summit has fallen under the cloud of a historic issue that has long strained ties between them and flared up again last week.

China protested on Thursday after it emerged that Aso had made an offering, a ceremonial plant, to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors 2.5 million war dead as well as 14 top war criminals from World War II.

Beijing said it had expressed to Japan its “serious concern and dissatisfaction” over Aso's offering and warned of “a serious and negative influence to bilateral relations.”

The shrine has been a long-time flashpoint because China, like other Asian countries, still deeply resents Japan's militarist past — in China's case the bloody occupation of parts of the country from 1931 to 1945.

Aso's visit comes amid heightened regional tensions after North Korea's purported satellite launch over Japan on April 5, which was widely seen as a disguised test of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

China and North Korea are communist allies, while relations have been highly strained between Pyongyang and Tokyo, mainly because of North Korea's nuclear program and its past abductions of Japanese citizens.

Despite their differences, Beijing and Tokyo “share the common grand goal of disarming North Korea,” said University of Tokyo professor Akio Takahara.

“The worst case scenario for China is that Japan goes nuclear after feeling threatened by North Korea's nuclear arsenal.”

The summit will also touch on a territorial dispute over energy-rich parts of the East China Sea claimed by both nations, diplomats said.

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