Photo/Illutration China’s President Xi Jinping attends the plenary session during the 2023 BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Aug. 23. (Pool via AP)

Chinese President Xi Jinping will skip a Group of 20 summit in India on Sept. 9-10, dashing Tokyo’s hopes for quickly breaking the deadlock over Japan’s discharge of treated radioactive water through top-level dialogue. 

China’s foreign ministry announced on Sept. 4 that Premier Li Qiang will travel to New Delhi for the G-20 summit instead of Xi.

Some officials in Tokyo had acknowledged that it would be difficult to arrange a meeting between Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Xi in India.

However, others had hoped that the top leaders could defuse tensions over the release of filtered and diluted wastewater from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

China slapped an import ban on Japanese seafood on Aug. 24 when Japan began releasing the treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

Public facilities, restaurants and other organizations in Japan have received a flood of nuisance calls from China criticizing what Beijing calls “the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water.”

Li, No. 2 on the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee, will visit Indonesia for a series of summit meetings hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations starting on Sept. 5.

The focus of attention will be whether Japan will be able to arrange a meeting between Kishida and Li on the sidelines of the ASEAN conferences.

China, critical of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies, has emphasized the G-20, which includes many emerging economies.

This will be the first time that a Chinese president has been absent from a G-20 summit, which was inaugurated in 2008.

Xi has attended all G-20 summits, including two held online during the novel coronavirus pandemic, since 2013 when he became president.

(This article was written by Nozomu Hayashi in Beijing and Anri Takahashi.)

Related News