No Chinese Smiles for Japan at APEC
NTV’s “Bankisha” looks at the weekend’s APEC summit and the state of Sino-Japanese relations :
- An informal poll of 100 foreign journalists assigned to cover the summit found that 37 of them consider China to be the world’s most influential country, beating out the 30 votes that the United States received.
- At these kinds of summits, it is customary for the First Lady of the host country to take the First Ladies of other countries on mini friendship tours. It looks like most of the First Ladies were participating, but Hu Jintao’s wife was not there. Instead, she went on a private tour of a museum and did some shopping.
- Japan had hoped to arrange a formal meeting between Prime Minister Kan and President Hu Jintao, but when Kan’s official schedule was announced, it contained no meeting with Hu. The Chinese side refused to schedule the meeting. Then, at the last minute, China decided it would allow Japan the honor of meeting with its glorious President. To fit in the meeting, Kan was forced to reschedule a meeting with the President of Russia. At most of the meetings that day, leaders smiled for the news cameras. Hu did not smile when he met Kan.
The NTV reporters note that their latest poll numbers show that public approval of the Kan administration has fallen to 29.4%, a drop of about 18 points since last month. Nearly 75% of respondents had a negative view of Kan’s foreign policy achievements.
- Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
- Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
