US president hopes four-nation trip will help build regional engagement

US President Barack Obama will visit Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines in April to increase US engagement in this region.

The visit, announced by the White House on Wednesday, comes at a time of increasingly tense relations between Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul over territorial disputes and controversy over Japan's interpretation of its wartime past.

Obama will likely visit Japan from April 22 to 23 on his third trip to the country since 2010, according to Japan's public broadcaster NHK.

Earlier this year, Tokyo expressed concerns that Obama would skip his April stop in Japan due to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit on Dec 26 to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Class-A war criminals.

After Abe's visit, US diplomats in Japan said Washington was "disappointed" that Japan had frayed its relations with China and the ROK.

Ruan Zongze, vice-president of the China Institute of International Studies, said Washington recently dispatched senior officials, including Vice-President Joe Biden and the US ambassador to Japan, to urge Tokyo from stirring up regional tensions.

"But Washington is considering the whole picture from two sides. We cannot say that the US will give up Japan or that the US-Japan security treaty is no longer important," Ruan said.

Abe has also angered South Korea, another key US ally, by denying that "comfort women" were forced to provide sex to the Japanese army before and during World War II.

Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, an economic newspaper in Tokyo, said Obama's visits to Japan and South Korea will help mend ties. South Korea has invited Obama to stay longer than he has planned in Seoul.

Chinese analysts said Abe and Obama may discuss the US-Japan alliance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and the disputes between Japan and China over China's Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.

Liu Jiangyong, an expert on Japanese studies at Tsinghua University, said Abe will continue to take advantage of US concerns over China's emerging power to foster alienation between the two countries.

The Associated Press commented that Obama has sought to rebalance US diplomatic and military resources toward Asia "as China and other countries in the region gain clout and economic power".

While Obama won't visit China in April, observers said he likely will meet President Xi Jinping when both attend the Nuclear Security Summit in the Netherlands next month.

The US president may also visit China in the fall when he attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing.

Beijing said on Thursday that the Sino-US relationship is developing steadily.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said maintaining the stable development of the relationship serves the interests of both countries and the Asia-Pacific region.

Observers also questioned Obama's commitment to his strategic pivot to Asia after he canceled his trip to the continent, including stops in the Philippines and Malaysia, in October due to the partial shutdown of the US federal government.

Obama's visits to Manila and Kuala Lumpur "are intended to make up for his no-show," Agence France-Presse said.

At a recent seminar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, 37 percent of the seminar's attendees said the US strategic pivot was designed well but poorly implemented, while 39 percent said it was poorly designed.

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(China Daily 02/14/2014 page12)