South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol sat down for one-on-one talks with visiting Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Sunday, kicking off two days of trilateral summitry that includes Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Yoon is hosting Li and Kishida for the three-way summit taking place for the first time since December 2019 in a bid to get the gathering back on track after the waning of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid economic challenges faced by all three countries. The summits began in 2008 but have not been held annually. The Seoul event is the ninth.
Ahead of Monday’s main event, the three are holding a series of bilateral talks before a planned dinner later Sunday.
First on the schedule was the bilateral summit between China and South Korea. Since Yoon took office in May of 2022, Seoul’s relations with Beijing have been tested as the conservative president has made closer ties with Washington and Tokyo centerpieces of his foreign policy.
In opening remarks, Yoon said, “I hope we can continue to strengthen our cooperation amid today’s global complex crises,” Yonhap News Agency reported. Yoon also flagged the need for China and South Korea to work together to address economic challenges connected to geopolitical flareups in Ukraine and the Middle East, according to Yonhap.
Further details of what the leaders discussed at the meeting were not immediately available.
Analysts have said that the China-South Korea talks are likely to focus less on high-profile matters such as security and more on issues easier to forge common ground such as people-to-people exchanges and cooperation on climate change responses. President Xi Jinping of China does not participate in the trilateral summit gatherings, which are handled by the country’s less powerful premier.
Yoon met Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 Summit in Indonesia in 2022.
In recent years, public opinion polls have found increasingly negative views of China among South Koreans. Last year, the U.S. overtook China as the number-one destination for South Korean exports.
China’s Li and and Japan’s Kishida, who are also set to hold a bilateral meeting, both arrived in Seoul earlier on Sunday.
Kishida’s visit comes as Japan and South Korea have seen their often rocky relations undergo a reset that started in March of last year when Yoon proposed the establishment of a foundation that would pay compensation to Koreans forced to work for Japanese companies during World War II. The matter was one of a few issues stemming from Japan’s 1910-to-1945 rule of the Korean Peninsula that has complicated ties for decades.
Tokyo has insisted that all such matters were settled under a 1965 agreement that established bilateral relations. In the ensuing years, mostly left-wing governments and civic groups in South Korea have pushed for Japan to make new shows of contrition and pay restitution to individual South Koreans.
The same month Yoon proposed the foundation, he became the first South Korean president to travel to Japan for a bilateral summit since 2011. Kishida made a reciprocal visit to Seoul roughly two months later.
In addition to bolstering bilateral ties, under the two leaders Seoul and Tokyo have stepped up trilateral cooperation with Washington, their shared ally. In August, Kishida and Yoon held a trilateral summit with President Joe Biden at Camp David near Washington, during which they heralded “a new era of trilateral partnership.”
Among the new forms of cooperation were the real-time sharing of missile warning data as part of efforts to deter North Korea, which all three countries see as a common threat. They also alluded to increasing cooperation on “supply chain resilience” to prevent disruptions to shipment of key items such as semiconductors and batteries.
Analysts told Nikkei Asia that China has been quietly unnerved by Seoul and Tokyo’s increasing closeness to Washington, its rival for economic and military power in Asia, and that part of Beijing’s motivation for taking part in Monday’s trilateral summit is a desire to “soften” that trilateral framework.
