Taro Aso, the Japanese Prime Minister, was welcomed to China yesterday with assurances of Beijing’s commitment to improving their up-and-down relationship.

However, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, reminded his counterpart that those warmer ties had not come easily.

Less than a week ago those improvements faltered when Beijing issued a formal complaint over Mr Aso’s decision to give a potted plant to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo where convicted war criminals from the Second World War are remembered along with the country’s other war dead.

But other imperatives — chiefly the global financial crisis and the escalation of regional tensions as North Korea has threatened a second nuclear test — have overridden such bilateral differences. Premier Wen was clearly determined to ensure that Mr Aso's visit progressed smoothly.

Meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing as the Japanese and Chinese flags fluttered side-by-side around the adjacent Tiananmen Square, Premier Wen described relations as “one of the most important bilateral ties for both our countries”.

He said: “The development of stable, long-term, friendly neighbourly Sino-Japan relations meets the fundamental interests of the people of both our nations.”

The talks mark the third top-level meeting between the two sides in April alone. Mr Aso met Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, on the sidelines of the G20 summit of rich and industrialising nations in London and held brief talks with Mr Wen at a regional summit in Thailand.

China had previously frozen all such high-level exchanges for five years amid rising anti-Japanese sentiment at home that culminated in street protests in 2005 – including attacks on Japanese diplomatic missions in Beijing and Shanghai.

Now China’s Communist Party leadership seems determined to foster better ties, partly as North Asia struggles to find a way to halt North Korea’s build-up of a nuclear arsenal and as neighbours assess that the financial crisis means smooth relations are essential to their economic wellbeing.

The downturn in relations between Japan and China was prompted largely by past visits to the Yasukuni Shrine — seen as a symbol of Japan's militaristic past — by its former Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi. His departure from office resulted in a swift return to normal. Still unresolved disputes over uninhabited islands north of Taiwan and the interpretation in Japanese classroom textbooks of Japan's Second World War history have also served as irritants.

Mindful of public opinion in China, Premier Wen kept an allusion to Japan’s brutal wartime invasion in his remarks. "Historical issues are sensitive and affect the feelings of a nation’s people," he said. It is hoped the Japanese side can endeavour to handle them properly."

Still, those comments were relatively mild. They come only days after the premiere of a film about the 1937 Nanjing massacre that, for the first time in China, shows a more human side to the invading troops. It has opened to positive reviews and big audiences. China says that hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by advancing Japanese troops.

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