Japan-China summit 'first step' to better ties: Abe

Japan and China have taken the "first step" on the road to improving badly strained relations, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Nov. 10 after a half-hour summit with President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
      
The two men held their first face-to-face meeting since coming to power and after presiding over two years of animosity that some observers have warned was leaning perilously close to military conflict.
      
"It was the first step for improving relations by returning to the starting point of mutually beneficial relations based on common strategic interests," Abe told reporters after the brief summit on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting.
      
The summit, the first in three years, comes after a long period of bitter hostilities focused on a territorial dispute and Japan's 20th century treatment of China.
      
Relations plunged in 2012 when Tokyo nationalised part of the Senkaku islands, an uninhabited chain in the East China Sea.
      
It insisted the move was a mere administrative change of ownership, and said it had done so to prevent their being bought by an inflammatory nationalist who wanted to build on them.
      
China, which claims the islands under the name Diaoyus, reacted with fury, accusing Japan of upsetting a delicate equilibrium that had held for decades. Japan has refused even to acknowledge the existence of competing claims.
                      
The islands became the scene of regular confrontations between paramilitary vessels as both countries pressed their ownership amid rising nationalist sentiment.
      
Military jet fighters also weighed in as China unilaterally carved out an air control zone and battleships eyed each other...