Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) arrived in Seoul yesterday for a three-way summit with South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aimed at repairing relations strained from historical and territorial issues.
A day before the summit, Park and Li were to hold a separate meeting yesterday with a likely focus on trade issues between two of the region’s closest economic partners. Li might also seek some sort of assurance from Park that Seoul, a key US ally, would keep a neutral stance over the recent flare-up between Washington and Beijing over the US Navy’s freedom of navigation operations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, analysts said.
Today’s trilateral summit is the first since 2012. The meetings were shelved after Japan’s ties with its two neighbors deteriorated over disputes stemming from its wartime aggression and territorial claims.
Photo: Reuters
Park is to meet Abe tomorrow in the first formal bilateral summit in more than three years.
Japan and China have been gradually resuming exchanges following 2012 tensions over the control of disputed islands in the East China Sea. The rift began healing after diplomats agreed to restart contacts November last year, when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) briefly met and shook hands with Abe.
Park has met Xi six times since she took office in 2013, in efforts to further strengthen ties with China, South Korea’s largest trade partner.
However, Seoul’s ties with Tokyo have been persistently icy after Abe came to power in December 2012, as the nations struggled to settle disputes stemming from Japan’s brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula in the early 20th century. China has similar gripes with Japan.
The US wants Japan and South Korea, important allies in the region, to be on better terms to counter China’s growing influence, including in the South China Sea, and also to strengthen security cooperation against North Korea.
The US Navy on Monday sent a warship in its most direct challenge yet to China’s artificial island building that has upset other claimants in the South China Sea, including the Philippines, a close US ally.
Taiwan also has claims in the region.
While it is unlikely that anything exceptional would transpire from the Seoul meetings, it is meaningful that the neighbors have taken the first step toward overcoming their bitter differences by restoring an environment for higher-level dialogue, said Bong Youngshik, a senior analyst at Seoul’s Asian Institute for Policy Studies.
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