South Korean and Chinese leaders yesterday agreed to start diplomatic and security dialogue and push a trade deal, when they met in Seoul ahead of a key trilateral summit with Japan.
There are low expectations of any major announcements or breakthroughs at the trilateral meeting today, but the leaders have expressed hopes it could help revitalize three-way diplomacy and ease regional tensions.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol met Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強), who is making his first visit to South Korea since taking office in March last year, and they agreed to establish a diplomatic and security dialogue and resume talks on a free-trade deal.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“China and South Korea face significant common challenges of the international affairs,” Yoon said, pointing to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as sources of increased uncertainty in the global economy.
Yet with decades of solid ties behind them, he hoped the two countries “will continue to strengthen our cooperation amid today’s complex global crisis,” Yoon said.
Li said Beijing wanted to work with Seoul to become “a good neighbor worthy of trust on a mutual basis.”
Photo: Reuters
The two leaders discussed North Korea, which has contravened successive rounds of UN sanctions over its banned weapons programs, with Yoon telling Li he hoped China could be “a bastion of peace as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.”
Yoon, Li and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are to hold a trilateral meeting today, the first such encounter since 2019, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to long-strained ties between South Korea and Japan.
Yoon, who took office in 2022, has sought to bury the historical hatchet with former colonial power Japan in the face of rising threats from nuclear-armed North Korea.
Yoon also met Kishida yesterday, and said the two countries’ trust and exchanges had “dramatically increased over the past year,” pointing to booming tourism, with millions of Koreans flocking to visit Japan, and vice versa.
He said he hoped to see a “historic turning point” and a further deepening of ties next year to mark 60 years since a post-war deal normalized relations between Tokyo and Seoul.
Kishida said it was crucial that Seoul and Tokyo moved to step up cooperation “to better prepare for global issues while maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Experts have said that due to the three countries’ starkly divergent positions on key issues including Pyongyang’s nuclear threats and growing ties with Russia, it would be hard for them to reach a consensus.
However, South Korea and Japan, which are key regional security allies of China’s archrival the US, are looking to improve trade and ease tensions with Beijing, experts say.
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