After two years of bitter arguments over wartime history, riots on the streets, and the suspension of top-level meetings, China and Japan yesterday took the first steps towards pulling their relationship out of its nosedive.

Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, and Shinzo Abe, the newly elected Japanese Prime Minister, agreed to overcome the differences that have brought diplomacy between two countries to one of its lowest points since the war, jeopardising business contracts and transmitting unease across an already volatile region.

Referring to the first meeting of the respective leaders in Beijing in five years, President Hu told Mr Abe: “Your visit is a turning point in China-Japan relations and I hope it will also serve as a new starting point for the improvement and development of bilateral ties.”

In a joint statement, the first issued by the two countries for seven years, they resolved to do all they could to prevent their mutual neighbour, North Korea, from carrying out its threat of last week to test a nuclear warhead. Mr Abe said: “We have a common foundation, understanding and perception that we can never tolerate this.”

The leaders promised to step up talks over a chain of islands claimed by both sides in the East China Sea, and to revive frozen discussions on defence, economics and culture. Significantly, they agreed to continue talking. President Hu and Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, accepted invitations from Mr Abe to visit Tokyo. Mr Hu’s visit will be only the second by a Chinese president and the first since 1998.

The summit came less than a fortnight after Mr Abe’s election and marks a significant success in one of the biggest challenges facing him — how to overcome the resentment and distrust engendered among Japan’s East Asian neighbours by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi.

China and South Korea were infuriated by Mr Koizumi’s insistence on making annual visits to the nationalist Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where Japanese war dead are worshipped as Shinto gods, among them 14 convicted Class A war criminals. Rage over the shrine visits resulted in anti-Japanese riots in several Chinese cities last year and the suspension of high-level contacts.

If anything Mr Abe is a more committed nationalist and right-winger than his predecessor, and he too has been a habitual worshipper at Yasukuni. His own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was for a while imprisoned as a Class A war criminal before being exonerated and going on to be Prime Minister — last week Mr Abe said that the conviction of the other wartime leaders had no legal validity in postwar Japan.

But, after refusing to do so a month ago, he has now embraced a 1995 apology that expresses heartfelt regret for Japanese rapaciousness during the Second World War.

“The course Japan has taken over the 60 years since the end of World War II is based on a deep apology for the great suffering and pain caused in the past by Japan on the peoples of Asian nations and the scars that have remained,” he said late last night, echoing the words of the statement made on the 50th anniversary of Japan’s surrender by Tomiichi Murayama, then the prime minister. “This is a feeling that I also feel, and a feeling I will always have in the future.”

His Chinese hosts appeared relieved at having the opportunity to remove the impasse in Sino-Japanese relations, which was causing anxiety to Japanese investors, fearful of consumer boycotts and unrest in their Chinese factories. For its part, the Chinese Government, nervous about mass displays of popular sentiment, appeared to be rattled by the anti-Japanese riots in Shanghai in April last year.

By making Beijing his first overseas trip as Prime Minister, Mr Abe was paying the Chinese a compliment that is usually enjoyed by the US President. President Hu told his guest: “That your first overseas trip was made to China shows that you place great value on improving and developing China-Japan relations.”

The two countries had a still more urgent matter on which they could agree — the need to prevent North Korea from carrying out its threat to test a nuclear warhead.

China, which nurtured North Korea throughout the Cold War and fears a sudden collapse of the isolated state and an outflow of refugees, has been reluctant to impose the sanctions that Mr Abe favours. But both sides agreed yesterday that nuclear weapons in the hands of Kim Jong Il, the unpredictable leader of North Korea, were a bad idea.

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