Seoul, South Korea. The leaders of South Korea, China and Japan will meet next week in Seoul for their first trilateral talks in more than four years to discuss how to revive their cooperation, South Korea’s presidential office said Thursday.
Since their inaugural independent trilateral summit in 2008, the three countries were supposed to hold such a meeting between their leaders every year. But the summit has been called off due to the COVID-19 pandemic and often rocky ties between the Asian neighbors since the last one in December 2019 in China.
The trilateral meeting between South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will take place in Seoul on Monday, Kim Tae-hyo, Seoul’s deputy national security director, said in a press conference.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend.
Li and Kishida were scheduled to arrive in South Korea on Sunday. They would meet bilaterally with Yoon on Sunday afternoon before attending a welcome dinner with the South Korean president, Kim said.
“This summit will be a turning point for Korea, Japan and China to fully restore and normalize tripartite cooperation systems,” Kim said.
During the trilateral meeting, Kim said the three leaders were expected to discuss cooperation on six issues proposed by South Korea: personnel exchanges, climate change, trade, health and aging population, technology and disasters. He said these discussions will be included in a joint statement after their summit.
Kim said the three leaders will also discuss unspecified regional and international political issues and how to respond together to a global polycrisis and contribute to international peace.
Closely linked economically and culturally to each other, the three countries together represent around 25% of the world’s gross domestic product. But efforts to bolster trilateral cooperation are often hampered by a combination of issues, including historical disputes stemming from Japan’s wartime aggression and strategic competition between China and the United States.
South Korea and Japan are key military allies of the United States and together host a total of 80,000 American troops in their territories. The advancement of North Korea’s nuclear program and China’s growing assertiveness in the region have forced South Korea and Japan to strengthen their trilateral security partnership with the United States. This has angered China and North Korea.
Ties between South Korea and Japan had fluctuated severely due to problems caused by Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945. But their relations have improved significantly since 2023, when the two countries took a series of important steps to go beyond that history and boost cooperation in the face of shared challenges such as North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and supply chain vulnerabilities.
South Korea, Japan and the United States want China, North Korea’s main ally and source of aid, to use its influence to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. China does not officially support North Korea’s nuclear program, but is suspected of avoiding full implementation of United Nations sanctions against North Korea and sending covert assistance to help its impoverished socialist neighbor stay afloat. Experts say China believes that having North Korea serve as a bulwark against American influences on the Korean Peninsula will serve its strategic interests.
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