The top diplomats for China, South Korea and Japan are to meet in Tokyo this weekend for talks, Seoul said yesterday, as the neighbors move to bolster regional ties.
South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Cho Tae-yul and his Japanese and Chinese counterparts, Iwaya Takeshi and Wang Yi (王毅), are to “exchange comprehensive views ... for the development of trilateral cooperation,” Seoul’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
The meeting in Tokyo on Saturday will be the 11th trilateral ministerial meeting, the statement said, with the last such meeting held in November 2023 in the South Korean port city of Busan.
Photo: AFP
The countries are also to hold bilateral talks on the sidelines of the three-way summit, Seoul added.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the meeting was “expected to discuss concrete cooperation in a wide range of areas, such as people-to-people exchanges, economic cooperation and measures to combat the falling birthrate.”
The top diplomats were also set “to agree to coordinate the holding of a summit meeting of the three countries by the end of the year.”
NHK said Tokyo also aims to resolve some outstanding bilateral issues, “ such as China’s measures to suspend imports of Japanese fisheries products.”
In May last year, the leaders of the three countries held a rare summit in Seoul — the first such high level talks in five years — at which they agreed to deepen trade ties.
The three countries also reaffirmed their commitment to the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — a reference to nuclear-armed North Korea.
Seoul and Tokyo typically take a stronger line against Pyongyang than does China, which remains one of North Korea’s most important allies and economic benefactors, despite leader Kim Jong-un’s recent moves to bolster ties with historic ally Russia.
Beijing has previously resisted condemning Pyongyang for its weapons tests, instead criticizing joint US-South Korea drills for raising tension.
Seoul and Washington accuse Pyongyang of sending thousands of North Korean soldiers to help Russia fight its war against Ukraine, in return for technical assistance from Moscow for its banned weapons programs.
Experts say any moves by Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing to ramp up trilateral cooperation and boost economic ties augers well for future agreements on more difficult topics like Kim’s nuclear weapons.
The announcement comes as South Korea awaits a Constitutional Court’s ruling on whether to remove President Yoon Suk-yeol from office over his botched martial law declaration in December.
While in office, Yoon has pushed for closer ties with Japan, attempting to bury the historical hatchet to present a united trilateral front with the US against North Korea’s growing military provocations.
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS