Appointment in Peking

For the second time in eight months, China's aging leaders will gather this week at the now familiar willow-edged airport outside Peking to greet a traveler on a historic mission. Last February the U.S. President stepped out of Air Force One and totally changed the geopolitical shape of the world. This time the plane will be a Japan Air Lines jet carrying the leader of a country whose rivalry with China scarred Asia for the better part of the past century. The arrival of Japan's Premier Kakuei Tanaka in Peking, said China's Premier Chou En-lai last week, will mean "a new leaf in our history."

Though this week's meeting will necessarily stand in the long shadow of Richard Nixon's summit of last February, it will also surely rank as one of the great symbolic events of the postwar era--an Asian counterpart of Willy Brandt's travels to Warsaw and Mos cow in 1970. Tanaka's arrival in Peking comes almost 35 years to the day after full-fledged war broke out between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Japan's invading Imperial Army in 1937. It is only one of the ironies of the summit that Tanaka's journey of atonement will be another blow to the Nationalists. The Japanese Premier's six-day visit will end on the eve of Oct. 1, making the summit a kind of obeisance to Mao Tse-tung's Communists, who use that date as the anniversary of the triumphant establishment of their regime in Peking in 1949. When a ranking Japanese emissary arrived in Taipei early last week to plead for "understanding" of the summit, Nationalist student demonstrators greeted him with angry placards crying TANAKA GO TO HELL!

Tanaka, a bluff-spoken millionaire real estate man and lifelong politician, brings to his Peking venture only three months' tenure as Japan's Premier and little experience in diplomacy (see box). Though he is not strong on foreign affairs, he is an acknowledged authority on what figures to be a principal target of the summit negotiation: Japanese domestic politics.

As Tanaka well knows, Sino-Japanese relations are the single most powerful issue in Japanese politics. Only last week, the Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun published a poll showing that 39% of the Japanese population now rate China as Japan's top foreign policy priority, while the U.S., which had always led such polls before, dropped to second place with a 28% rating. If the Peking summit is successful, Tanaka may call a quick election, perhaps as early as next month, to add a public mandate to the Liberal Democratic Party vote that brought him the premiership last July, when longtime Premier and Party Chief Eisaku Sato retired at 71 (TIME, July 17).

The Peking summit comes at a time when Tanaka's Japan is already riding a kind of diplomatic crest. Though the Nixon economic and diplomatic shokkus of last summer are still fresh in Japanese memories, Tanaka managed to come away from his summit with the President in Honolulu last month with what looked like U.S. approval and support. Moscow has been actively courting Tokyo, and is pressing to begin work on a long-delayed peace treaty. Then there was China's decision to deal with Japan, after so many years of anti-Japanese vituperation. As one American diplomat in Tokyo puts it: "In the multipolar game, that's not a bad score."

Why have the Chinese decided to deal with Tokyo now, having scornfully rebuffed Japanese advances for years? The chief consideration may well be fear of Russia. Peking may have begun to fret that the gradual U.S. withdrawal from Asia, and China's longstanding anti-Japanese policy, might simply push Tokyo closer to Moscow, which recently increased Russian military strength along China's border from 47 to 50 divisions. The Chinese also need Japanese technology to help modernize their economy. Then there is the age factor: now that Mao is pushing 79, Chou, who is 74, could be hurrying to complete Peking's return to outward-looking diplomacy while the Chairman is still around to give it his imprimatur.

Locked in War. One question that only the summit can answer is how anxious the Chinese are to force Japan to sever formally its ties with Taiwan. Chou himself has hinted that he would be willing to see Japanese business continue to operate on Taiwan, which imports more than $760 million in Japanese goods annually (China's imports from Japan totaled $578 million last year, and they are not expected to rise dramatically even if diplomatic relations are established). But it remains to be seen how tough Peking intends to be about its longtime insistence that Tokyo must flatly renounce its peace treaty with Taiwan. Though the Japanese seem to be in a strong bargaining position--Peking needs a rapprochement more than Tokyo does--they may well have to yield a great deal if they are to achieve their objective: immediate diplomatic recognition and an embassy in Peking before next spring. With that possibility in mind, the Nationalist embassy in Tokyo last week laid in a supply of large packing crates, just in case a quick exit might be necessary.

Certainly, the summit will not bring instant warmth to relations between China and Japan. They have been rivals for centuries and locked in war --military or verbal--almost continuously since the annexation of Formosa (Taiwan) by Japanese troops in 1895. So far, Chou has not publicly softened his oft-expressed view that Japan's economic growth "is bound to bring about military expansion." Given the history of hostility on both sides, the prospect is thus for a summit of convenience, not for a summit of real reconciliation.

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