HANOI, Oct 30 (Reuters) - The premiers of China and Japan met on the sidelines of an Asian regional summit in a bid to defuse a territorial dispute on Saturday, while the United States urged Asia's two big economies to cool the standoff.
On Friday, initial expectations of a bilateral talk between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan were dashed at the last minute, when China cancelled the meeting and blamed Japan for “damaging the atmosphere” at the Asia-Pacific summit in Hanoi by raising the issue of the disputed Diaoyu islands, called the Senkaku islands in Japanese.
A Japanese official, however, said the two leaders subsequently held an “informal” 10-minute meeting on the sidelines of the summit early on Saturday morning in a seemingly positive step after the diplomatic row.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who met her Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, in Hanoi, said both sides should remain calm.
“We have made very clear to both sides that we want the temperature to go down,” a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters after the meeting.The United States has stepped up Asian diplomacy under the Obama administration and is worried about being excluded from groupings such as the EAS as China expands its diplomatic and economic presence.
But the summit this year, the fifth since the group's founding in 2005, has been overshadowed by the row over maritime claims which has strained ties between Asia's two biggest economies.
Both China and Japan claim sovereignty over the isles. Relations between China and Japan deteriorated last month with the detention of a Chinese fishing boat captain by the Japanese coast guard after their boats collided near the islands. |
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