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Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who met for the first time as leaders in 2014, shook hands, looking downcast and gloomy expressions.
Both men seemed determined to avoid any hint that they enjoyed the meeting at a forum in Beijing.
Four years later, Abe is about to receive a much warmer reaction when he arrives in Beijing on Thursday for his first official visit to China for years.
And that's largely thanks to US President Donald Trump.
The unconventional foreign policy of the Trump government with respect to trade and military alliances has left Tokyo in uncertainty as to the support of the United States, which has underlined its international relations since the end of the Second World War. World.
On the other side of the East China Sea, Beijing is under increasing pressure from the Trump administration and desperately needs diplomatic and economic allies in the region.
"The United States is the target of Japan and China," Koichi Nakano, a professor of political science at the University of Tokyo in Tokyo, told CNN. "Xi Jinping means to Abe that they are together."
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Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have always been very different with Washington – an opponent an opponent to the limit, the other a close alliance – but the two countries now face similar complaints from of the Trump administration.
The disputes between Trump and China are well known, given the implications for the global economy and the diplomatic arena.
Billions of dollars of Chinese goods have been stripped of customs duties by the Trump administration, while US authorities accuse China of widespread theft of intellectual property.
In recent months, the conflict has spread beyond economic concerns to encompbad military and political issues, and Trump has said without foundation that Beijing would intervene in the US elections.
But for Japan, the conflict is more complicated and unexpected. The United States has been a military and diplomatic ally close to Tokyo for more than 70 years.
Abe was the first international leader to meet Trump after the 2016 US presidential election.
Despite numerous meetings and a concerted effort to woo the US president, the Japanese government has been left empty handed.
"All of these fantasies, as well as the Shinzo-Donald affair, have not really led to any special treatment for Japan, but rather to quite often crude and hostile attitudes to trade," he said. Nakano to CNN.
Diplomatically, Abe was left in the cold during highly publicized talks with North Korea at this year's talks between Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul, which was deeply felt in Tokyo.
"Trump's political awareness of trade goes straight back to the 1980s, with Japan … If you're looking for consistency, he thinks Japan and South Korea are not loyal to trade and he stay true to this vision, "said Richard McGregor. , a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, told CNN.
Longstanding rivalry
Nevertheless, despite the hostility of the United States to bring Beijing and Tokyo closer, the long and painful history of these two countries makes it difficult to achieve lasting and lasting rapprochement.
Relationships have been tense since the end of World War II amid recriminations aroused by Japan's brutal occupation of parts of China.
Progress in the normalization of relations In ruins in 2012, when a long simmering quarrel over a barren islands claimed by China and Japan resulted in public protests and threats of retribution.
The dispute over the owner of the Diaoyu Islands, known as Senkakus in Japan, has prompted a rapid cooling of diplomatic relations, the culmination of which was the cold meeting between Abe and Xi in 2014.
At the same time, the cultural wars around Japan's occupation of China have resurfaced, with Beijing politicizing the atrocities of the war while the Tokyo nationalists argue that their country should regain its national pride.
The unlikely warming of relations between the two countries began in September 2017 when Abe became the first Japanese leader for 15 years to attend the national day celebrations organized by the Chinese Embbady.
Experts say that if Trump insists on trade and security issues for both countries, China and Japan are desperately seeking to ease their regional relations as they seek out allies to help them weather the American storm.
"China is looking for a friend, which means that they are much more willing to welcome Japan and forget about their serious strategic differences – the same goes for Japan, in a sense," McGregor said.
"Very free"
While China needs Japan's help to fight Trump's commercial actions, Japan is desperately seeking to protect the current liberal economic order in the region, guest researcher CNN Stephen Nagy told CNN at the Japanese Institute of International Affairs.
"Their concern is that if relations continue to deteriorate, there will be a US market and a Chinese market (separate, closed) (…), which will increase the cost of doing business in Japan," he said. he declares. "They do not want that to happen."
"We must not sit back and remain indifferent to the damage done to global trade and the global supply chain," he said. "We should be united to express our strong support for free trade and our opposition to protectionism."
But the growing rapprochement between the two countries does not mean that all the problems between Tokyo and Beijing have been solved, nor guaranteed.
Last week, the Chinese Foreign Ministry publicly and severely reproached Abe for sending ritual offerings to the Yasukuni Shrine, the Tokyo Temple that honors a number of convicted war criminals.
"We urge Japan to face and reflect on its history of invasion," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang.
As the presidents of the United States and their policies come and go, deep disagreements between China and Japan over history and territory diverge enormously and are still unresolved.
"These underlying, more fundamental issues will likely be more relevant and influential than the temporary factor that Trump is," said Nakano.
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