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I did not really want to hear what Paul Keating was saying during a television interview last week about how he experienced the seemingly irrational views of Japanese and Chinese leaders when he was chatting informally with them as our Prime Minister. The distrust between the two nations that Mr Keating detected from his talks just seemed too incredible to take seriously. Surely Paul was taking an egg-beater to some meaningless asides that were well short of meriting the concern he was showing about future conflict in north Asia.
Then at the weekend I came across the story on the website of the Chinese People's Daily which appears alongside:
It was a measured but pointed Chinese response to a visit that the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made while
visiting Kolkata (Calcutta) in India to meet the 81 year old Prasanta Pal, whose father Radhabinod Pal, according to another and earlier People's Daily report, was the only member of the 11-judge Allied war crimes tribunal after World War II to voice dissent at the process, criticizing the panel as an example of victors' justice.The Chinese report said Japanese media have said Abe's meeting in Kolkata could fray improving relations with China, which suffered under Japan's military aggression in the first half of the 20th century. An editorial last week in Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's biggest newspaper, criticized Abe's planned meeting with Pal, saying that it was aimed at claiming innocence for the war criminals. "He will travel all the way to India to embrace the descendants of a judge hailed as a hero by Japanese militarists for claiming innocence for Class-A war criminals," it said.
Reading this made me ponder again what Paul Keating had said in that 7.30 Report interview with Kerry O'Brien.
Well, I was at a dinner with him one night and I was Treasurer then and he was Finance Minister of Japan. He later became Prime Minister.
And, you know, I've been friendly with him a long time and he said to me, "Mr Keating, let me ask you this, do you think the Chinese will attack us?"
And I said, "No, Mr Miyazawa, I don't". He said quizingly, "But why not?" And you could feel the hair on the back of your neck go up, a thing like that.
Another event I had was on the Chinese side one of the three people who managed China in the '90s said to me quite candidly, "If the Japanese ever go to nuclear weapons, we would take them out before they started", meaning they would attack them first.
No good ever happens in that relationship between China and Japan. It's just simmered along in resentment and mistrust since the war.
And then a little later in the interview, this exchange:
KERRY O'BRIEN: Do you believe, really, that the tensions between China and Japan are as potentially explosive today as they were back when you had those conversations with Miyazawa and the Chinese?
PAUL KEATING: They're kind of worse. Worse than then, because China, I mean, in those days China was on the ropes trying to come out of Tiananmen Square, you know. And Japan was still top of the pops in economic growth, it hadn't gone through the big '90s recession.
Now, it's reversed. China is now the second or third largest economy in the world. It's the same size as Japan. Japan grows at 1 per cent, China grows at 11 per cent. China's ageing demographic means the country's shrinking. China has got a much younger demographic.
And the Japanese very much resent the rising power of China, and the Chinese resent the fact that the Japanese are still trying to call the war history like some kind of self defence thing. So, the game remains nasty, and anyone in the Australian polity who doesn't know that, knows nothing.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But why aren't the major leaders seeing this, if it's such a compelling argument?
PAUL KEATING: In the end they're turkeys Kerry, they won't take the big issues on.
To get up and say to the Chinese, "You will find a place for the Japanese in your scheme of things," and to the Japanese, "You will atone for the sins of the Second World War and make a point of accommodation with China".
The Americans are in there playing their game with their mates, the Japanese, and trying to push the Chinese off to one side, and they might need the Japanese to defend the old colony, Taiwan, in the past, their old colony of the past.
But this is where leadership comes in. This is why we've now wasted two US presidencies on these issues. At least with Bill Clinton the last thing I did as Prime Minister was get Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin to have reciprocal visits. That bettered the relationship between China and the US, got China into the World Trade Organisation.
