Parties Talking To The Party

"Normalization? What normalization? Sino-Japanese relations have always been run throught the Komeito." *

Two weeks ago on Channel News Asia I tried to explain that newly announced Cabinet and Liberal Democratic Party line ups hinted that repair work on the Sino-Japanese political relationship was less likely to be conducted state-to-state as party-to-party. (Link)

Yesterday, at a lecture/press availability, New Komeito vice representative Kitagawa Kazuo revealed that unnamed high-level members of the LDP and New Komeito executive secretariats will be traveling to China in October to meet with counterparts in the Chinese Communist Party in what should be read as a preparatory visit for a possible Xi Jingping-Abe Shinzo direct dialogue on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in November. Unsurprisingly, Kitagawa made mentioned of the two high ranking officials of the LDP I highlighted when I talked on CNA two weeks ago. (Link - J)

Working party-to-party, in what I called in the video a privatization of the relationship, is not necessarily a bad thing, despite the negative connotations "privatization" has. Working LDP/NK-to-CCP certainly allows both sides to get past the cumbersome prerequisites each of the respective governments has declared are the minimal decencies that must be met before the two sides can sit across from each other in those grotesquely overstuffed armchairs the Chinese favor.

However, those of us who still harbor illusions of living in a democracy rather than in what is one of a set of strangely similar Asian plutocratic aristocracies (thank you, Indonesia, for keeping lit the pathetic tiny flame of meritocracy) still must wince at princelings convivially meeting each other in their private capacities rather than facing off against each other in the public arena.

Given how close we might be to stupid shooting breaking out between paramilitary forces of both sides, we possibly should not be so picky about how conversations get restarted.

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* Not an actual quote, of course. C'mon.


Image: Kitagawa Kazuo speaking on 17 September 2014.
Image courtesy: New Komeito official website.