Friday 26 / April / 2024
Seoul: The Foreign Ministers of South Korea, China and Japan will meet for talks in in the southeastern port city of Busan, South Korea on Sunday, reported Yonhap News citing Seoul's foreign ministry on Friday.
The meeting is intended to set the stage for the first summit between the three countries' leaders in four years.
South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa on Sunday for broad discussions on ways to boost trilateral cooperation and other regional and global issues.
Before inviting the Japanese and Chinese ministers to a luncheon meeting and consequent three-way talks, South Korean Foreign Minister Park will hold separate bilateral talks with Wang and Kamikawa, respectively.
Foreign ministers Wang and Kamikawa are expected to arrive in Busan on Saturday.
After nearly a four-year hiatus the trilateral summit among the leaders of the three Northeast Asian neighbors will raise the prospect of returning to the annual summit format.
As the current rotating chair, Seoul has been pushing to host the summit before the end of this year.
The last time the trilateral summit was held was in China's southwestern city of Chengdu in December 2019.
Largely the summit has not gone ahead as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the deterioration in bilateral relations between Seoul and Tokyo over the issue of compensating Korean victims of forced labour during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, has also played a role in the summits delay.
In March South Korea said it would compensate the Korean victims on its own without asking for contributions from Japanese companies, dramatically warming tensions between the two states, Yonhap News reported.
In a senior officials' meeting in late September, the three countries agreed to hold the tripartite summit at "the earliest convenient time."
After Pyongyang and the Kim Jong-Un regime successfully launched their military spy satellite on Tuesday, talks have come at a time of concern for the three states.
South Korea, the United States, Japan and Britain have accused the North of providing weapons and munitions to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, in return for getting assistance in military technologies, Yonhap News reported.
The satellite's successful entrance into orbit is expected to be a key agenda during Sunday's talks.
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.
