Japan's Miyazawa Showed Skepticism about China to Clinton

Politics

Tokyo, Dec. 26 (Jiji Press)--Then Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa expressed his skepticism about China's democratization in a summit with then U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1993, Japanese diplomatic documents showed Thursday.

Miyazawa showed the view when Clinton asked him about the future of China in their meeting in Washington on April 16, 1993, according to the documents declassified by the Foreign Ministry the same day.

Meanwhile, Miyazawa called on the U.S. government to continue to give the most-favored-nation trade status to China.

During the 1992 presidential election, Clinton criticized the then President George H.W. Bush's attitude toward China as weak.

After China's Tiananmen Square bloody crackdown against protestors in 1989, Clinton was taking the position that it was necessary to improve the country's human rights situation in order to continue the most-favored-nation treatment of the country.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]

Jiji Press