The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

wan issue and agreed to expand military exchanges
and enhance high-level contacts between the two defense
departments. In June, the first Japanese combat
vessel since World War II made a port call in China
when the destroyer Sazanami visited Guangzhou. The
Sazanami brought with it relief supplies for the survivors
of Szechuan’s Wenchuan earthquake even as
Japanese relief workers were seen on China’s television
pulling the living and the dead from collapsed
buildings. In 2009, the two defense ministers agreed
to restart the defense dialogues that had ceased after
2006. These developments complemented existing
agreements whereby Chinese and Japanese military
officers would attend their opposite number’s highest
level professional military education (PME) centers.
These military exchanges were paralleled by Sino-
Japanese summitry expressing goodwill and cooperation
between the two countries. Prime Minister Yasuo
Fukuda visited China in December 2007 and President
Hu Jintao made a return visit to Japan in May 2008.
Notably, this was the first visit by a Chinese president
to Japan since 1998, and Hu’s longest visit to a foreign
country since selection as president in 2003. At the
summit’s conclusion, the two political leaders signed
a six-point joint statement committing China and Japan
to strategic cooperation. 72
Even as these positive elements in Sino-Japanese
relations were emerging, long-standing territorial
disputes continued to produce friction. In September
2007, Chinese air force bombers made some 40 sorties
over 2 days into the airspace around the disputed
Chunxiao gas field in the East China Sea. Japan scrambled
fighters from an Air Self Defense Forces (ASDF)
base on Okinawa in response. 73 Somewhat more than
a year later in December 2008, two patrol boats from
85