China's Hu to make plans for Japan visit

HANOI, Nov 18: Chinese President Hu Jintao today signalled his intention to visit Japan, officials said, as the two countries seek to mend ties hurt by the previous Japanese prime minister's controversial trips to a war shrine.

Hu and current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met in Hanoi where they also agreed to work together to try to restart stalled six-way talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons. The talks are expected to begin again next month.

The pair met on the sidelines of a conference of Asia-Pacific nations for what was their second round of talks after Abe visited China in October.

Since taking office in September, Abe has moved quickly to try to improve relations with China, which had deteriorated to their coldest in decades over visits by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni war shrine.

Today when Abe repeated a previous invitation to visit Japan, Hu expressed thanks and said the matter should be negotiated at a diplomatic level.

''On the whole, we have a positive attitude,'' Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters of the proposed visit.

Abe supported Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni, and has also paid respects there himself in the past, but has repeatedly declined to say whether he will make such visits as prime minister.

Yasukuni, where wartime leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal as Class A war criminals are honoured alongside war dead, is seen by many in Asia as a symbol of Japan's aggression in Asia before and during World War Two.

The shrine was not mentioned at talks today, Japanese officials said.

The leaders agreed to try to deepen ties, including possibly by holding meetings between economics ministers, but Tokyo and Beijing remain divided by a number of issues.

On the long-running row over development of natural resources around a disputed area of the East China Sea, Abe suggested top-level talks on the issue and Hu agreed, Japanese officials said.

Six rounds of official-level talks have made little progress on the issue.

REUTERS