A year on, Takaichi goes to Shenzhen with no meeting booked
Tokyo offered to reaffirm the 1972 communique as a way out of Takaichi’s Taiwan remarks; Beijing refused and insists the prime minister retract them herself. The rare earth curbs and the travel advisory still stand, and the condition now belongs to a government that does not yet exist.
Shenzhen hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit on Nov. 18 and 19, 2026, and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will attend. No meeting with Xi Jinping is booked. A senior official at Japan’s Foreign Ministry said there would be no Japan-China summit, and that none was likely for as long as Takaichi remains in office: Japanese officials have been describing the summit as already lost.
The anniversary is what turns an empty calendar into a verdict. On Nov. 7, 2025, at a session of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, Takaichi said a contingency over Taiwan “could constitute” a survival-threatening situation for Japan — the legal category that allows the Self-Defense Forces to exercise the right of collective self-defense. A week earlier she had stood beside Xi in Gyeongju, South Korea, on Oct. 31, where the two governments agreed to build ties that are “constructive and stable,” and she raised her concerns about China’s rare-earth export controls. The year since has been spent undoing that first week.
Beijing has not moved. On Nov. 6, 2026, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said the Japanese authorities “have not moved at all,” and that the current difficulties in the relationship are “entirely the responsibility of the Japanese side” (Xinhua). In Tokyo the same day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said the government’s position on Taiwan “remains as stated in the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communiqué” and that it “has not changed at all,” reaffirming the document as the basis of Japanese policy. He declined to comment on whether a bilateral meeting would take place, saying he did not want to prejudge it.
What Takeshi Iwaya offered instead was a formula. The former foreign minister, who chairs the Association for the Promotion of International Trade, Japan, was in Beijing from Sept. 27 to 30, 2026, and met Wang Yi on Sept. 28 and Vice Premier He Lifeng the day after. He proposed that both governments reaffirm the four political documents that underpin the relationship, beginning with the 1972 communique, a step he argued would effectively amount to a retraction. Wang rejected the substitution, said that ambiguous approaches were not good, and asked for three things: the withdrawal of the remarks, a “rational perception” of China and a “correct view of history.” Noting that 2027 marks 55 years of normalized relations, he said that normalization was needed once again.
Ambiguous approaches are not good. In China, there is a saying that the person who solves a problem should be the very party who caused it.
The refusal was partial, and the part left open explains the rest. Wang told Iwaya that Ambassador Wu Jianghao had been given authority to hold talks aimed at resolving the issue, including intergovernmental ones, and Iwaya judged that the answer “did not leave no room for consideration.” The condition itself never moved: the person who made the remark has to withdraw it, and a retraction in the Diet carries a price the prime minister has so far refused to pay. Her own fallback, offered shortly after the original remarks, was that she would “refrain from making comments on specific cases from now on” — a promise of future silence, short of the correction Beijing is asking for. Masaaki Kanai, who heads the ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, had restated the same reading of the communique before the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 28, 2026.
What the freeze costs
Beijing priced the dispute into trade quickly. Licensing for dual-use exports, rare earths among them, was tightened, and Chinese authorities advised citizens to avoid traveling to Japan; both measures remain in force. He Lifeng told Iwaya that goods for civilian use faced no obstacle and that China was ready to sell them. Iwaya’s account of the same meeting is that licensing had grown stricter even for products used solely in civilian sectors — a gap between what the exporter is told and what the importer sees.
The travel advisory left a mark that can be counted. Arrivals from mainland China fell 55.5% in the first nine months of 2026, to 3.34 million, and 44.5% in September alone, to 430,800, on Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) figures; Chinese visitors spent ¥358.3 billion in the third quarter, 39.8% less than a year earlier, the Japan Tourism Agency reported (as reported).
The economics explain the pressure and none of the deadlock. A licensing rule can be eased and an advisory withdrawn; the Chinese condition names the prime minister and asks her to say in public that she was wrong about Taiwan. Reaffirming the 1972 communique produces no such act, which is why the September formula died in the room where it was offered.
Beijing also has reasons not to hurry. Xi has spent the past year stabilizing relations with Washington, which lowers the cost of leaving Tokyo in the cold, and a source close to the relationship measured the horizon in years: “it will take several years for things to turn for the better”.
The precedent promises no better. Xi and Shinzo Abe met at the 2014 APEC summit in Beijing with the Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyu Islands, still in dispute, and the meeting settled nothing; it gave both governments a photograph and a channel. Shenzhen will most likely produce the same, or less. The condition Beijing set in September belongs to a person, and the only event that changes the person is a change of government in Tokyo. Normalization now waits for whoever governs Japan after Takaichi, and the year that follows this summit should look much like the one just ended.