The foreign ministers of South Korea, China and Japan are set to meet in Busan, South Korea, on Sunday, the first trilateral foreign ministerial meeting since August 2019.
South Korea, the sponsor and chair of the meeting, hopes to use the opportunity to improve its relations with China, which have been strained in recent years. However, experts are not optimistic about the chances of a breakthrough at the meeting.
Mao Ning, spokesperson of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in the daily press briefing on Wednesday, "The trilateral cooperation serves the common interests of our three countries. China values the mechanism and looks forward to working with the ROK and Japan to deepen that cooperation." ROK is the abbreviation for the official name of South Korea.
The foreign ministers of the three countries may hold bilateral talks between China and Japan and China and South Korea during the meeting.
Meeting proposed by South Korea
According to previous reports by Kyodo News, this foreign ministers' meeting was proposed by South Korea, indicating South Korea's willingness to improve South Korea-China relations.
Since South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol came to power, the country has focused its foreign policy on deepening cooperation with the United States and Japan. Yoon has met with U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida this year. But he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have not held formal talks since the G20 summit in November last year.
This situation has brought the trilateral cooperation among South Korea, the United States and Japan to a de facto "quasi-alliance" level, but it has also caused South Korea-China relations to be increasingly cold.
There has been frequent discord between the two countries.
During the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting earlier this month, a much-anticipated meeting between Yoon and Xi failed to take place. According to Yonhap News Agency, the two leaders talked for only about three minutes.
Although the two governments later avoided over-interpreting the situation, the Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo quoted an anonymous senior official in the South Korean presidential office saying, "The meeting itself has symbolic significance. China talked with Japan but not us, which is indeed not a good situation."
China critical of South Korea
China criticized remarks Yoon made about China-Russia-North Korea cooperation, the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea in an interview with the Telegraph ahead of his recent state visit to Britain.
Mao said in the regular press briefing on Monday, "We don't need to be told what to do or not to do. The Taiwan question is entirely China's internal affairs and brooks no foreign interference. On the South China Sea, China and ASEAN countries have the ability, confidence and wisdom to handle this issue well. The ROK is not a party to the South China Sea issue, and there's no point in getting involved."
Jae-hung Chung, director of the Center for China Studies at the Sejong Institute, said in a phone interview with VOA that there are many problems between South Korea and China, including deep strategic distrust, China's dissatisfaction with the security cooperation between South Korea, the U.S. and Japan, and the differences the two countries have about Taiwan, the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula.
Chung said if South Korea wants to improve its relations with China, it must make policy changes. However, these kinds of changes cannot be made by South Korea alone. Chung told VOA that South Korea must communicate with the United States, but it is hard to say if the United States can help South Korea in these aspects.
Heungho Moon, a professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Hanyang University, said, "At present, China's most important issue is its relations with the United States, followed by the Taiwan issue and the South China Sea. On these issues, South Korea has nothing to help China, and China believes that South Korea has kept pace with the U.S.
"Fundamentally speaking,” Moon said, “as long as the current cooperation between South Korea, the United States and Japan continues, there will be limits to the improvement of China's relations with South Korea and Japan."
