CHINA: An annual summit between China, Japan and South Korea scheduled for mid-December has been postponed, Beijing said yesterday as neighbours continue to question Japan's true remorse for its second World War aggression.
The summit, which was to have taken place on the sidelines of a regional conference in Malaysia, had been postponed to an appropriate time due to the "current atmosphere and conditions", the foreign ministry said.
The statement gave no further details, saying only that China would continue co-operation with the other two parties and hoped that obstacles to stable development could be removed.
Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper reported last week that the three-way summit, which has taken place every year since 1999, might be cancelled due to Chinese and Korean anger over Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to a war shrine.
Tokyo's ties with Beijing and Seoul have been chilled by Mr Koizumi's pilgrimages to the Yasukuni shrine, which they see as a symbol of past Japanese militarism.