East Asian countries agree to restart cooperation and summit
South Korea, Japan and China last met in 2019. No date is set for leaders’ gathering.
SEOUL — Meeting for the first time in about four years, the top diplomats from South Korea, Japan and China agreed Sunday to revive cooperation among the Asian neighbors and resume their leaders’ trilateral summit — but without a specific timing.
Closely linked economically and culturally with one another, the three countries together account for about 25% of the global gross domestic product. But efforts to boost cooperation have often hit a snag because of a mix of issues including historical disputes stemming from Japan’s wartime aggression and the strategic competition between China and the United States.
“We three ministers agreed to restore and normalize three-nation cooperation at an early date,” South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin told reporters after his meeting in Busan with counterparts Yoko Kamikawa of Japan and Wang Yi of China.
Park said the three ministers affirmed an earlier agreement by lower-level officials to restart the summit “at the earliest mutually convenient time” and agreed to expedite preparations for the meeting. Kamikawa separately said the ministers agreed to speed up their work to achieve the summit “at an early and appropriate timing.”
The three also agreed to push for diverse cooperation projects in areas such as people-to-people exchange, trade, technology, public health, sustainable development and security, according to South Korean and Japanese statements.
The lack of an agreement on the timing for the trilateral summit would suggest the top-level gathering probably won’t happen this year as South Korea, the chair of the next summit, had hoped, observers say. Still, Kamikawa said that a reactivation of a trilateral diplomacy “is an important step toward achieving an upcoming Japan-China-South Korea summit.”
Since they held their first stand-alone, trilateral summit in 2008, the leaders of the three countries were supposed to meet annually. Instead, the summit has been suspended since 2019. Sunday’s meeting in South Korea was also the first since 2019.
South Korea and Japan are key U.S. military allies, hosting a total of 80,000 American troops on their territories. Their recent push to beef up a trilateral security cooperation with the United States has angered China, which is extremely sensitive to any moves it perceives as seeking to contain its rise to dominance in Asia.
But some observers say the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Biden struck a conciliatory tone this month in their first face-to-face meeting in a year would provide Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing with diplomatic room to maneuver to find ways to revive threeway cooperation.
After her meeting with Wang on Saturday, Kamikawa said she renewed her government’s demand that China remove its ban on seafood imports from Japan in response to Tokyo’s discharge of treated radioactive wastewater from its tsunami-stricken nuclear power plant. Wang, for his part, said China opposed Japan’s “irresponsible action” of releasing the wastewater and called for an independent monitoring mechanism of the process, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Ties between South Korea and Japan deteriorated severely in past years due to issues stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonization of the Korean peninsula. But their relations have warmed significantly in recent months as the two countries took a series of major steps to move beyond their history and boost cooperation in the face of North Korea’s advancing nuclear program and other shared challenges.
In a reminder of their difficult relations, however, a Seoul court last week ordered Japan to financially compensate Koreans forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during the colonial period.
During her meeting with Park earlier Sunday, Kamikawa called the court verdict “extremely regrettable” and urged South Korea to take appropriate steps to remedy the breaches of international law, according to the Japanese Consulate in Busan. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said the ministers discussed the court ruling as well as ways to work together to reinvigorate threeway cooperation with China. The ministry also said that both strongly condemned North Korea’s spy satellite launch last week.
Park also asked Wang for China to play a constructive role in persuading North Korea to halt provocations and take steps toward denuclearization, according to South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.
Wang described China as “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.