An overwhelming majority of Chinese and Japanese people believe relations between their countries are "important", or even "more important than relations with the United States", according to a survey released Wednesday.

Almost six in 10 Japanese interviewed for the survey, which was jointly sponsored by China Daily and Genron NPO, said relations with Beijing were as important as those with Washington. Another quarter of interviewees said ties with China were even more important than those with the United States.

Genron NPO, the survey's co-sponsor, is a leading Japanese think tank, similar to the American Council on Foreign Relations.

The survey has been conducted annually for the past five years, focusing on "ordinary citizens" and "intellectuals".

In China, the intellectuals were university students attending well-known schools. In Japan, the 500-strong intellectual group was largely made up of previous members of Genron NPO.

Answers from both ordinary Japanese and intellectuals were basically consistent when it came to evaluating relations with Beijing.

On the Chinese side, almost half of the intellectuals believed ties with Tokyo were more important than those with Washington. That number was higher than the quarter of ordinary urban citizens who felt the same way.

Feng Zhaokui, former deputy head of the Institute of Japan Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said people in both countries rated ties between them highly for financial reasons.

"The trend is basically decided by increasing economic interdependence of the nations," said Feng. "Especially, given the fact that China passed the US to become Japan's largest trading partner in 2007 and that China found in the financial crisis the US is not that reliable."

The latest survey shows Chinese and Japanese view each other slightly more positively than they did last year, though more than half of each nation still dislikes the other.

Among ordinary Chinese, 32.6 percent said they had "very good" or "relatively good" impressions of Japan, a 3.3-percentage-point increase on last year. And 45.3 percent of Chinese students had a positive impression, two percentage points higher.

In Japan, 26.6 percent of Japanese had a positive impression of China, a 2.5 percent increase from last year.

But the reduction in animosity was small and may not ease much more in future because of biased media reports and limited direct interaction, said the head of Genron NPO, Yasushi Kudo.

Chinese and Japanese people tend to learn about one another's country through television news and newspapers, the survey found.

Though three-quarters of ordinary Chinese believe domestic reports about Japan, less than one-third of intellectuals trusted their media to be objective. And less than one-third of Japanese believed their country's reports on China.

According to the survey, only 15 percent of ordinary Japanese have visited China or have friends in China.

"For Japan, China is a close, but distant, country," Kudo said. "Mistakes made by media will misguide people, and our survey has found much misunderstanding due to that."

Gao Anming, an editorial board member at China Daily, said media in both countries should reflect on their work.

"Eye-catching reports are not always helping the readers to learn the facts. Media should have a view of the overall situation and stop abusing their power."

The survey was taken in May and June, based on a sample of 2,597 and 1,500 in China and Japan respectively.

(China Daily August 27, 2009)