China has warned Japan against “crippling regional peace and security” after the lower house of parliament in Tokyo passed bills to allow Japanese troops to fight abroad for the first time since the second world war.
The two bills were passed despite widespread popular opposition and questions over their constitutionality. Opposition parties staged a walkout in protest before the vote, while tens of thousands of protesters demonstrated outside parliament. But, with the governing Liberal Democratic party (LDP) controlling two-thirds of the seats, the outcome was never in doubt.
The legislation, part of a long-running bid by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, toreinterpret Japan’s US-authored pacifist postwar constitution, now has to go before the upper house, where the LDP and its allies are also in the majority. It will have 60 days to vote but if the upper house rejects the bills, it can be overridden by the lower house. Opposition parties, deeply attached to the doctrine of collective self-defence, are planning legal challenges.
If the new bills survive, they would permit the Japanese government to deploy soldiers abroad in UN peacekeeping missions and for collective defence, for example in alliance with the US and Australia, in the face of a direct threat to Japanese security.
“It is fully justified to ask if Japan is going to give up its exclusively defence-oriented policy,” China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement. “We solemnly urge the Japanese side to … refrain from jeopardising China’s sovereignty and security interests or crippling regional peace and stability.”
The Japanese parliamentary vote comes at a time of heightened tensions with China, which has stepped up construction on a chain of disputed atolls in the East China sea. Beijing also regularly criticises the Japanese prime minister, accusing him of seeking to gloss over the horrors of the 1937 invasion of China.
Referring to the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in what Beijing calls “the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression”, Hua said: “We solemnly urge the Japanese side to draw hard lessons from history.”
China is planning a large-scale military parade to mark the end of the second world war in the Pacific. China’s official Xinhua news agency also condemned the Japanese vote, saying it meant “a nightmare scenario has come a step closer for Japanese people and neighbouring nations”.
If passed, the bills would “tarnish the reputation of a nation that has earned international respect for its pacifist constitution over a period of nearly seven decades”, the agency said.
The head of Japan’s National Security Council held talks with China’s top diplomat on Thursday intended to prepare for a possible summit between the leaders of the countries later this year in Beijing. The meeting between Chinese state councillor Yang Jiechi and Shotaro Yachi, a career diplomat and a close aide to Abe, were part of a continuing attempt to prevent the standoff over the Pacific islands and the Japanese parliamentary vote leading to a new breach in relations between the countries.