High-Level Talks Unlikely to Fix Deep China–Japan Rifts: Analysts

Beijing’s back-to-back meetings with a senior Japanese politician show it wants to keep channels with Tokyo open, but its own coercion is driving Japan away, experts say.

Takeshi Iwaya, president of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade (JAPIT) and a former Japanese foreign minister, met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on Sept. 28 and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on Sept. 29, according to the regime’s state-run mouthpiece China Global Television Network.

Iwaya headed a roughly 50-member delegation that included corporate executives, Japanese outlet The Mainichi reported.

The JAPIT, a key channel for Japan’s trade and economic ties with China, has organized trips there nearly every year to call on top government officials.

Iwaya said that the current state of Japan–China relations is concerning, and that the JAPIT will work to bring bilateral relations “back to the original intent.”

More Dialogue, but Not More Trust 

Bonnie Yushih Liao, a senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo, said the current relationship between the two Asian neighbors is one of “managed competition with selective cooperation.”

“The fact that Wang and He met Iwaya on consecutive days is important,”  Liao told The Epoch Times.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), speaks during a press conference at the LDP headquarters in Tokyo on Feb. 9, 2026. Franck Robichon/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

“Beijing clearly wants to preserve political and economic channels with Japan, and Tokyo also has strong reasons to avoid uncontrolled deterioration in the relationship.”

Liao said enormous economic interests are at stake, and neither Tokyo nor Beijing benefits from turning every disagreement into a crisis, but the structural problems are “much harder to resolve.”

“Beijing wants a better relationship with Tokyo, but many of the tools it uses to pressure Japan are pushing Tokyo further away,” she said.

“That is why I expect more dialogue between China and Japan, but not necessarily more strategic trust.”

Miscalculations   

“Taiwan is increasingly connected in Japanese security thinking with the defense of the southwestern islands, the East China Sea, the U.S.–Japan alliance and the security of the first island chain,” Liao told The Epoch Times.

“So even if Takaichi changed her language tomorrow, the underlying strategic debate in Japan would not simply disappear.”

Fighter jets on China's sole operational aircraft carrier, Liaoning, during a drill at sea on April 24, 2018. AFP via Getty Images

Liao said Beijing also aims to show that influential political and business constituencies in Japan still favor engagement, but that could prove a miscalculation.

“Japanese politicians may disagree considerably over diplomatic engagement and historical issues while still supporting stronger economic security, defense capabilities, and closer coordination with the United States,” she said.

“In that sense, pressure can now reinforce the argument in Japan that excessive dependence on China creates strategic vulnerability.”

Robert Eldridge, director of North Asia for the Global Risk Mitigation Foundation in Hawaii, said Beijing risks overestimating Iwaya’s sway, since a trade association chief cannot steer a prime minister who reflects Japanese public opinion.

“The Japanese are sick of the PRC dictating to it and bullying Japan, and bullying Taiwan as well, and Takaichi symbolizes that frustration,” Eldridge told The Epoch Times, using the abbreviation for China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping “ain’t going to find any honey under the Takaichi government, nor should he expect to,” he said.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said at a Sept. 29 news conference that Iwaya’s meetings were a private business group’s activities and declined to comment on the details.

Rare Earth Dilemma

Eldridge said Beijing could approve selected civilian rare earth shipments to Japan following Iwaya’s trip, while keeping its curbs in place.

A front loader shifts soil containing rare earth minerals at a Chinese port for export to Japan in 2010. STR/AFP/Getty Images

“Doing so would protect Chinese suppliers’ revenues, and give the visit a tangible result,” he said.

“[It could also] encourage continued engagement through business channels, and retain leverage through the licensing system.”

China accounts for approximately 70 percent of global rare earth mining and controls up to 90 percent of the processing and refining capacity worldwide.

Eldridge said excessive restrictions also carry a strategic cost for China.

“They accelerate investment in alternative suppliers, processing, recycling, and substitute technologies,” he said. “Beijing therefore has an incentive to calibrate pressure rather than make dependence on China commercially intolerable.”

Eldridge said a handful of licenses would not secure supplies, and that the rare earth export controls are yet another sign that the CCP is “completely unreliable.”

“Therefore, decoupling and alternative supply chains are the only long-term solution,” he said.

Liao said repeated economic coercion leads countries to restructure their economies around it, making the regime’s tactic effective in the short term but self-defeating in the long run.

“If it does not use its rare earth dominance, it loses an important instrument of pressure,” she said.

“But every time Beijing uses that leverage, it gives Japan another reason to make that leverage weaker tomorrow.”