Japanese leaders' insistence on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, where memorial tablets of World War II war criminals are housed, has knotted up China-Japan relations, which is difficult to untie.

The most feasible thing to do is to promote better ties with a greater variety of channels.

The first thing that needs to happen in tackling the tough situation is promoting non-governmental exchanges in attempts to improve official ties.

Sino-Japanese ties traditionally consist of two parts people-to-people interactions and official relations. Before the rapprochement in 1972, for instance, far-sighted Chinese and Japanese personnel prompted non-governmental exchanges to promote the development of official ties between the two countries, which eventually led to the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1972.

As Sino-Japanese ties have run into straits, promoting official relations through non-governmental exchanges is definitely a political imperative.

It is people who exercise influence on international relations. Non-governmental exchanges have long constituted the human and social basis on which inter-country relations rest. The more solidly grounded this basis is, the better the inter-country ties are.

Since the approach of promoting official ties through people-to-people exchanges worked well before the Sino-Japanese rapprochement, it may as well be applied today, and more strenuously.

Importance should be especially attached to the exchanges between the two countries' younger generations.

The Japan-China 21st Century Foundation was founded in Japan this year, which intends to invite 150 Chinese senior high school students each year to visit Japan. This will foster the exchanges between the youths from both nations. On the part of China, such organizations should be instituted to attract more Japanese young people to China for visits.

Promoting the progress of economic relations between the two countries in order to boost political ties eventually is also an essential move.

In the scenario of deteriorating Sino-Japanese relations, some people from both sides have suggested that "economic cards" be played to force the other side to make concessions.

The Japanese Government, for example, has decided recently to freeze yen loans to China for the current fiscal year. This is regarded as "playing economic cards." But the progress of economic relations between China and Japan benefits both sides. So anything that does harm to the economic ties, which constitute the physical foundation for the general relationship of the two nations, should be opposed.

China will never play "the economic cards." Instead, the country will try to warm up political ties through heated economic relations.

Another way to better ties is by promoting cultural exchanges to cultivate friendly feelings.

Cultural exchanges are actually exchanges of people, feelings and hearts. China and Japan share a 2,000-year history of cultural exchanges. Both cultures are part of the same civilization system and both are the recipients of Western civilization's fruits in contemporary times.

The idea of promoting cultural exchanges to cultivate friendly feelings has been shared by more and more people on both sides in the face of icy political relations.

No one should expect cultural exchanges to bring about immediate relations improvement between the two nations.

Though the individual cultural program has little impact on the inter-country relations, the sum of thousands of such projects would have great significance.

In order to exercise influence on the central authorities, exchanges between localities on both sides should also be made.

There are 299 pairs of sister cities between China and Japan and exchanges between these cities are very active, which indicates that the political coldness is limited to the central authorities level.

Some scholars believe localities' co-operation is a more effective way to improve the Sino-Japanese ties than the approaches previously mentioned.

This is because local governments have the physical power to help push the people-to-people, economic and cultural exchanges and the exchanges between local governments of the two countries. All this will eventually impact the central authorities.

It is also important to promote multilateral co-operation so bilateral co-operation between China and Japan would be, in turn, propelled.

In recent years, China and Japan have been working together in the "10 plus 3" (10 ASEAN countries plus China, the Republic of Korea and Japan) co-operation, in the six-party talks on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and in other regional co-operative undertakings. This demonstrates that the two sides share increasing common interests in regional and international affairs.

Both nations have tacit mutual understanding that no bilateral disputes be brought into multilateral and regional co-operation because multilateral things come before bilateral ones, and regional affairs before bilateral ones, too. The telecommunications ministerial conference among China, ROK and Japan, which was introduced in 2002, has held four sessions, which is the embodiment of the trilateral co-operation.

At its fourth session held earlier this year in Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province, the three sides co-organized the Asia Home Network Council to facilitate the progress of the Internet in Asia.
 
China-Japan co-operation in multilateral and regional frameworks is bound to play a positive role in promoting the relations between the two nations as a whole.

Lastly, approaching the issue of Sino-Japanese relations with reason is a realistic way to promote mutual understanding.

Rational attitudes here mean looking at each other objectively and treating each other with fairness, with the fundamental interests of the two nations as the point of departure.

Irrational attitudes, by contrast, serve only to hinder the mutual understanding or trigger serious misunderstanding.

In view that the media in both countries has great influence on shaping the public's opinion about each other, objectivity and justness are called for in the reporting of each other.

The author is a senior research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

(China Daily May 10, 2006)