Japan braces for a Xi snub as Takaichi walks into China's APEC summit

Japan's diplomats have a very specific worry ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen on Nov 18 and 19: that Xi Jinping simply won't treat Sanae Takaichi like everyone else. Officials in Tokyo have asked Beijing for assurances that Xi will extend the same courtesies to her as to other leaders — at minimum a customary handshake — according to people familiar with the planning. If anything unusual is staged, Tokyo intends to protest.

:The stakes are high because ties between Asia's two biggest economies have slumped to one of their worst points since 1972, when the countries normalised relations. The trigger was Takaichi's statement last November that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could pose an existential threat to Japan. Other Japanese leaders had long held that view, but nobody had said it out loud in public — and she said it barely a week after meeting Xi on the APEC sidelines in South Korea.

,Beijing hit back hard. China has squeezed rare-earth exports to Japan, restricted seafood imports, and pushed Japanese companies onto lists that control or monitor their access to goods with military uses. It has also urged its own citizens to skip trips to Japan, which before the spat supplied about a quarter of the country's visitors. US manufacturers that depend on Japanese magnets have felt the pinch too, prompting Donald Trump to ask Xi in September to loosen the curbs.

,Some Japanese officials believe Xi personally demanded Takaichi retract the Taiwan remarks. She has refused, and pressed on with a security agenda that has annoyed Beijing further — including plans for maritime boundary talks with the Philippines announced in May, and suggestions from senior officials in Tokyo that they might revisit the ban on nuclear weapons entering Japan. China's state media has amplified a narrative that Japan is sliding back toward militarism, which Tokyo denies.

,Analysts see real room for embarrassment. Jeremy Chan, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group and a former US diplomat, said Beijing has spent the past year personalising its attacks on Japan and demonising Takaichi to an unusual degree. That, he said, raises the odds China uses APEC to downgrade her status or criticise Japan directly. Seating charts and the traditional leaders' family photo offer easy openings to sideline her. Xi publicly scolded Canada's Justin Trudeau at the 2022 G-20 in Indonesia, a tense exchange caught on camera.

,A proper Takaichi-Xi meeting looks unlikely, people familiar with the planning say, with contact expected to stay inside APEC's formal programme — including the leaders' dinner, where Xi is set to greet each attendee. Trump and Vladimir Putin are also expected at the summit, setting up the first post-war huddle of the three nuclear powers' leaders, which could leave Takaichi looking cut off from Washington, her only formal ally. She does have one route: catching Trump at the ASEAN summit in Manila days earlier, a trick she used in September on the UN sidelines. Chinese Premier Li Qiang will be at ASEAN too. Unlike 2014, when Shinzo Abe got his handshake from Xi after months of groundwork and a last-minute senior officials' meeting, nothing similar has been arranged this time. Xi even bypassed Takaichi in October, sending a condolence letter over Yasuo Fukuda's death straight to the former premier's wife. University of Tokyo political scientist Masaki Taniguchi's advice: stay calm, don't provoke, and don't kowtow either.