China announced sanctions on Monday against a Japanese lawmaker over his visits to Taiwan, as Beijing and Tokyo lock horns in a months-long diplomatic row.
Relations between China and Japan have deteriorated since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested in November that Tokyo could intervene militarily in any attempt by Beijing to seize Taiwan.
Beijing considers self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out the use of force to take control of the island, threatening countermeasures against diplomatic engagement with Taipei.
Keiji Furuya, a conservative lawmaker and Takaichi ally, is banned from entering mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau from Monday, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement.
He made “multiple runs to Taiwan in defiance of China’s strong opposition… seriously undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”, the statement said.
People and groups in China are also banned from engaging with the Japanese lawmaker.
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said that despite China’s calls to avoid Taiwan, Furuya had continued to “collude and stir up trouble with Taiwan”, and his sanctioning should “serve as a warning to others”.
The announcement comes after Furuya met Taiwan President Lai Ching-te in Taipei this month, when the 73-year-old lawmaker said Takaichi’s comments on Taiwan “maintain the Japanese government’s previous position and are not problematic”.
In Tokyo, Furuya shrugged off China’s decision, saying that he has no assets in China and had not visited the country in decades.
“The fact that they are imposing sanctions on something like this really makes me think: ‘That’s typical of China’,” he told reporters.
The Japanese government has urged China to lift the sanction, said Masanao Ozaki, deputy chief cabinet secretary.
“This is highly regrettable from the perspective of Japan-China relations,” he told a daily media briefing.
Furuya was previously the minister in charge of dealing with North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s, and the head of the National Public Safety Commission.
He is also a regular visitor to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours convicted war criminals along with 2.5 million war dead and is seen as a symbol of Japan’s militarist past.
Since Takaichi’s remarks about Taiwan, Beijing has imposed economic pressure on Tokyo and discouraged Chinese nationals from visiting Japan.
In September, China imposed its first sanctions on an individual Japanese lawmaker, targeting China-born Hei Seki for “spreading fallacies” on issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and disputed islands, prompting a protest from Tokyo.
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