The 11th China-Japan Public Opinion Poll released on Oct. 22, Thursday, revealed that tensions between the Chinese and Japanese public are waning. Longstanding issues such as territorial disputes and the countries’ history, however, leave a lingering negative impact.
According to the data collected by the poll, 41.1 percent of Chinese believed Sino-Japanese relations "will worsen." It shows a decrease as the 2014 polls resulted to 49.8 percent. The Japanese public roughly echoes the same sentiments. In Japan, the figure dropped to 24.7 percent from 36.8 percent.
Survey results also reflect the current "travel boom" in Japan as more Chinese express their want to travel to Japan, with figures rising to 35.7 percent from 29.6 percent.
Improving Sino-Japanese ties are attributed to be a result of high-level political dialogues between President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as well as other senior officials.
"There has been no outbreak of (major) sensitive issues, which could bring a downturn of our people's feelings, in the past year," said Yasushi Kudo, president of Genron NPO, a Japanese non-profit think tank that co-hosted the poll with China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration.
"You can find that an increasing number of Chinese people answered that 'they have Japanese friends' or 'have been to Japan,' I think that also made a great contribution to the improvement of the impressions," Kudo added in an interview with China Daily.
Still, ongoing territorial disputes continue to taint warming China-Japan relations; 6.4 percent of Chinese and 56 percent of Japanese chose "territorial disputes" as the "major issue obstructing the development of bilateral ties."
It did not that Shinzo Abe drew widespread criticism after failing to apologize for Japanese wartime crimes in a statement released to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
"Chinese people may be disappointed by the Abe Statement and may wonder why the Japanese government took a position that is against UNESCO's decision to inscribe Chinese documents related to the Nanjing Massacre in its Memory of the World Registry," said Wang Gangyi, vice president of China International Publishing Group.