BEIJING, Oct 18: China said on Tuesday Japan’s foreign minister is not welcome in Beijing, after the nation’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid a controversial visit to a Tokyo war shrine.

The announcement, made just days before Nobutaka Machimura was expected in the Chinese capital, appeared to mark an escalation in already strained relations between the two Asian giants.

“Given the present serious situation of China-Japan relations, this visit is not timely and the Chinese side is not in a position to receive the visit,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said in a regular briefing.

The decision to postpone the visit came one day after Mr Koizumi visited the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo, which honours 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including notorious war criminals executed after World War II.

Koizumi’s previous four visits there had all prompted strong protests from China, which suffered immensely under Japanese occupation in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mr Koizumi made the visit on Monday despite a series of large anti-Japanese protests in China this year sparked by Tokyo’s approval of history textbooks which downplay its wartime atrocities.

Japan had proposed to China that Mr Machimura make a visit later this week, the minister told reporters in Tokyo last week. But no firm date had been set.

In Tokyo on Tuesday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, the top Japanese government spokesman, said the meeting was “still in the process of being coordinated”.

“There has been no clear progress as to the question about what will become of it in the end,” he told a regular news conference.

Chinese state media expressed anger at Mr Koizumi’s shrine visit, with the English-language China Daily, intended partly for a foreign audience, accusing the Japanese leader of putting bilateral ties at a ‘new low’.

“By sojourning at the Yasukuni shrine, Koizumi has driven a wedge between Beijing and Tokyo,” the paper said in an editorial.

“Not true and resolute in deed, Japan is putting bilateral relations on a tortuous path.”

Mr Machimura’s visit was intended to be a fence-mending trip to improve ties that have soured over Japan’s treatment of history, disputed energy resources and Beijing’s opposition to Tokyo’s bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat.

On Friday, Mr Machimura told reporters he planned to visit China soon and hold talks with his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing.

“We have not fixed a definite date with them yet, but we have proposed I go over the next weekend and we have mostly come to terms,” Machimura said.

Japanese news reports said he would make the visit on Oct 23 and 24.

The Jiji Press news agency and other media had said Mr Machimura hoped to pave the way for a meeting between Mr Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

High-level meetings between the two countries’ leaders have been banned by China since Mr Koizumi began paying annual visits to the shrine after taking office in 2001.

China on Monday angrily protested Mr Koizumi’s latest shrine visit, calling it ‘outrageous’ and a ‘serious provocation’, warning that bilateral relations have been further damaged as a result.

“The Chinese government and Chinese people express strong indignation and lodged a strong protest to the Japanese side over Koizumi’s wrongful act which hurts the feeling and dignity of the victimized countries and seriously damages Sino-Japanese relationship,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“Prime Minister Koizumi must shoulder all the responsibility of the serious damage to Sino-Japanese relations caused by his wrongful actions,” the statement said.—AFP