China and Japan are expected to reach a broad agreement on panda leasing during Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's planned visit to Beijing next week, bilateral sources close to the matter said Friday.

The agreement would come as Sino-Japan relations have been markedly improving. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the signing and taking effect of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the two nations.

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Beijing and Tokyo are likely to formally agree on the leasing during Chinese President Xi Jinping's possible trip to Japan in June next year, the sources said. A zoo in Sendai or Kobe has been floated as a candidate to receive the panda.

Abe is scheduled to visit Beijing for three days from next Thursday, during which he will hold talks with Xi.

China first gave a pair of giant pandas to Tokyo's Ueno Zoo as part of its "panda diplomacy" in 1972 in commemoration of the normalization of bilateral ties.

In December 2011, when former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda visited Beijing, China expressed willingness to lease giant pandas to Japan. However, as relations between the two countries sharply deteriorated afterward amid a territorial row over a group of islands, an agreement on the matter was shelved.

The dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea particularly intensified after Noda decided to bring them under state control in September 2012. The group of uninhabited islets, called Diaoyu in China, are controlled by Japan but claimed by Beijing.