Busan: Top diplomats of South Korea, China and Japan were set to hold talks in the southeastern port city of Busan Sunday, with discussions on resuming the long-stalled three-way summit of the three countries’ leaders expected to be in focus.
The trilateral meeting among Foreign Minister Park Jin, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa also comes after about a four-year hiatus as the three neighbouring countries seek to deepen the tripartite cooperation despite many pending bilateral issues.
Wang and Kamikawa arrived in Busan Saturday, Yonhap news agency reported.
Park is joining the two Ministers the day after returning from a trip to London and Paris, where he accompanied President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Park will hold bilateral talks with Kamikawa and have separate talks with Wang Sunday morning.
Park will then host a luncheon meeting for his two counterparts before the trilateral talks take place later on Sunday.
Sunday’s trilateral talks are expected to centre on ways to revive the three-way summit among the leaders of the three Northeast Asian neighbours.
The trilateral summit has not been held since the last one took place in China’s southwestern city of Chengdu in December 2019.
The summit has been suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak and a deterioration in Seoul-Tokyo relations over the issue of compensating Korean victims of forced labour during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
Talks of reviving the summit gathered momentum amid a dramatic warming of Seoul-Tokyo relations after South Korea said in March it will compensate the Korean victims on its own without asking for contributions from Japanese companies.
In a senior officials’ meeting in late September, the three countries agreed to hold the tripartite summit at “the earliest convenient time”.
The Ministers are likely to discuss the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula after North Korea’s launch of a military reconnaissance satellite earlier this week, amid concerns over the growing military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow.
They are also likely to discuss efforts to promote three-way cooperation in forward-looking areas, such as sustainability and climate change, science and digital technologies, health and ageing society, and people-to-people exchanges.
It will mark the first visit by Kamikawa since she took office in September. Wang last visited South Korea in September 2021.
IANS
