The foreign ministers of China and Japan planned to meet and discuss visits by Japanese leaders to a controversial war shrine, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

Foreign Ministers Li Zhaoxing of China and Taro Aso of Japan were to meet later Tuesday at an Asian economic conference in Doha, Qatar, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao.

"The visit by Japanese leaders to Yasukuni shrine is the main crux of the difficulties in Japan-China relations. Definitely this issue will be discussed," Liu said in Beijing.

Critics consider the Yasukuni Shrine a glorification of Japan's wartime conquests of East Asia, and see Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits as showing approval of that stance.

China has repeatedly demanded that Koizumi abandon further visits to the shrine as a condition for better ties.

Koizumi says he goes to Yasukuni to pray for peace and that the visits are an internal Japanese matter. The shrine commemorates Japan's war dead, including executed war criminals.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last week in Tokyo that visiting the shrine "has not helped" efforts to improve relations between Tokyo and its neighbors.

"It has created some tensions in the region which I think we need to make some gestures to put behind us," he said.

Annan wouldn't say, however, what kind of gestures he had in mind or who should make them.