SEOUL, South Korea – Top diplomats from South Korea, Japan and China met for the first time in about four years and agreed Sunday to revive cooperation between the Asian neighbors and resume the trilateral summit of their leaders – albeit without a concrete one Time schedule.
Closely linked economically and culturally, the three countries together generate around 25% of the global gross domestic product. But efforts to strengthen cooperation often foundered on a mix of problems, including historical disputes arising from Japan’s wartime aggression and strategic competition between China and the United States.
“We three ministers have agreed to restore and normalize cooperation between the three nations soon,” South Korea’s foreign minister told reporters after meeting Japan’s Yoko Kamikawa and China’s Wang Yi in Busan, South Korea.
Park said the three ministers had confirmed an earlier agreement by junior officials to resume the summit “at the earliest opportunity” and agreed to speed up preparations for the meeting. Kamikawa said separately that ministers had agreed to accelerate their work to reach the summit “at an early and appropriate time.”
The three also agreed to advance diverse cooperation projects in areas such as people-to-people exchanges, trade, technology, public health, sustainable development and security, South Korean and Japanese statements said.
The lack of agreement on the timing of the trilateral summit would suggest, observers say, that the high-level meeting is unlikely to take place this year, as South Korea, which chairs the next summit, had hoped. Still, Kamikawa said reactivating trilateral diplomacy was “an important step toward an upcoming summit between Japan, China and South Korea.”
Since their first independent trilateral summit in 2008, the heads of state and government of the three countries have been scheduled to meet annually. Instead, the summit has been suspended since 2019. The meeting Sunday was also the first since 2019.
South Korea and Japan are important military allies of the USA and station a total of 80,000 American troops on their territory. Its recent push to strengthen trilateral security cooperation with the United States has angered China, which is extremely sensitive to any moves it sees as aimed at curbing its rise to dominance in Asia.
But some observers say the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden struck a conciliatory tone during their first face-to-face meeting in a year earlier this month would give Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing diplomatic space to find ways forward revitalize tripartite cooperation.
After her meeting with Wang on Saturday, Kamikawa said she renewed Japan’s demand that China lift its ban on imports of seafood from Japan in response to Tokyo’s discharge of treated radioactive wastewater from its tsunami-hit nuclear power plant. Wang, in turn, said China opposed Japan’s “irresponsible act” in discharging the wastewater and called for an independent monitoring mechanism for the process, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Relations between South Korea and Japan have deteriorated significantly in recent years due to issues related to the Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula in 1910–1945. But their relations have warmed significantly in recent months as the two countries have taken a number of important steps to move beyond the historic dispute and strengthen cooperation in the face of North Korea’s advancing nuclear program and other shared challenges.
But in a reminder of the difficult relations between them, a Seoul court earlier this week ordered Japan to financially compensate Koreans forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during the colonial era.
In her meeting with Park early Sunday, Kamikawa called the court ruling “extremely regrettable” and called on South Korea to take appropriate steps to address the violations of international law, according to the Japanese consulate in Busan. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said ministers discussed the court ruling and ways to work together to revive triangular cooperation with China. The ministry also said both strongly condemned the North’s spy satellite launch last week.
According to the South Korean Foreign Ministry, Park Wang also called for China to play a constructive role in persuading North Korea to stop provocations and take steps toward denuclearization.
Wang called China a “stabilizing force” in the region that “has always played and will continue to play a constructive role in easing the situation on the peninsula,” according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Wang called for stronger trade and economic ties between the two countries and criticized the “tendency to politicize economic issues.”
North Korea’s growing arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles poses a major security threat to South Korea and Japan. But China, North Korea’s last major ally and largest aid donor, is suspected of avoiding fully enforcing U.N. sanctions on North Korea and sending covert aid to the North, to help its impoverished neighbor stay afloat and continue to serve as a bulwark against U.S. influence on the Korean Peninsula.
On Sunday, South Korea, Japan and the United States conducted naval exercises with the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson near the Korean Peninsula, their latest show of force against North Korea.
North Korea typically views such military training involving the United States as an invasion rehearsal.
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Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Japan and Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Taiwan contributed to this report.