Trying to crawl out of its international isolation, China mended fences with Yugoslavian leader Josip Tito, who visited Beijing in May 1977 after having been long denounced as a revisionist traitor. In October 1978, Deng Xiaoping visited Japan and concluded a peace treaty with that country's prime minister Takeo Fukuda, officially ending the state of war that had existed between the two countries since the 1930s. While Japan and China had in fact opened diplomatic relations in 1972, the peace treaty took nearly six years to negotiate, one major sticking point being Chinese insistence on Tokyo including a clause that denounced Soviet "hegemony" in Asia.