China and Japan in talks over islands

THE premiers of China and Japan met on the sidelines of an Asian regional summit in an attempt to defuse a territorial dispute yesterday, while the US urged Asia's two big economies to cool the stand-off.

On Friday, initial expectations of a bilateral talk between Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan were dashed at the last minute when China cancelled the talks and blamed Japan for "damaging the atmosphere" at the Asia-Pacific summit in Hanoi by raising the issue of the disputed Diaoyu islands, called the Senkaku islands in Japanese.

A Japanese official, however, said the two leaders subsequently held an "informal" ten-minute meeting on the sidelines of the summit early yesterday morning in a seemingly positive step after the diplomatic row.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who met her Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, in Hanoi, said both sides should remain calm.

"We have made very clear to both sides that we want the temperature to go down," a US official said.

Clinton, in Vietnam for the first United States participation in an East Asia Summit (EAS), also sought clarification about China's policy on exporting rare earth minerals and got assurances from Yang that China wished to be a "reliable supplier" of rare earth minerals, the official added.

The United States has stepped up Asian diplomacy under the Obama administration and is worried about being excluded from groupings such as the EAS as China expands its diplomatic and economic presence.