A three-way summit between leaders of China, Japan and South Korea would be possible “before long,” South Korean President Park Geun-hye said.
Park, speaking to Southeast Asian leaders in Myanmar on Thursday, said she hoped the summit could take place after a planned meeting of foreign ministers from the three countries, according to an official from her office, who asked not to be identified because the statement is not yet public.
The remarks are the latest signal of a possible thaw in relations between Japan and both South Korea and China. Ties have been strained over territorial disputes that both countries have with Japan and over lingering resentment over Japan’s wartime aggression and its occupation of much of North Asia that ended with its defeat in World War II.
Photo: AFP
Park’s comments come after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the APEC meeting in Beijing this week, the first summit between the two since they both came to power in 2012.
“Japan’s efforts to improve relations with China, North Korea and the US must be her reasons,” Incheon National University professor Lee Jun-han said. “The timing of her proposal is hard to explain otherwise. If everything goes as well as Tokyo hopes, then South Korea may be a little isolated.”
Park had previously rejected offers for direct talks with Abe, saying his administration has been trying to deny atrocities committed during Japan’s 35-year occupation of the Korean Peninsula, including the Imperial Army’s use of sex slaves. She did agree to three-way meeting with Abe and US President Barack Obama at a nuclear proliferation summit in March, though bilateral relations with Japan have remained tense since then.
The two countries’ competing claims to a chain of uninhabited islands known as Takeshima in Japanese and Dokdo in Korean, have also sourced relations. Japan has a similar dispute with China over other uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, which Taiwan also claims, where ships and planes from the two countries regularly tail one another.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) told Abe at the Myanmar meeting that he hopes relations between the two countries can get back to normal, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing Li.
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