Sooner, or later? Stakes are high for Chinese summit with Japan and South Korea – but not urgent

Name: China agrees to a summit with South Korea and Japan after rare trilateral meeting
Uploaded: 2024-03-13T12:00:14.000Z
Duration: 2 min 50 s
Description: China agrees to a summit with South Korea and Japan after rare trilateral meeting

Lengthy delay in trilateral dialogue between the three neighbours signals meeting is not a priority for leaders

Without clear path forward on US-China competition, Washington remains ‘elephant in the room’ as Tokyo, Seoul align with US

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Analysts said the continued delay of a leadership summit between China, Japan and South Korea indicates it is not a priority for the three leaders. Photo: Shutterstock

Alyssa Chen

Published: 8:00pm, 13 Mar 2024

When the foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea met in the Korean city of Busan in November, expectations were high that they would clear the way to revive the trilateral leaders’ summit, on hold for more than four years because of the pandemic.

Seoul, current rotating chair of the dialogue, initially anticipated the summit would be held by the end of 2023 or early 2024. Japanese news agency Kyodo reported last month that the forum could be delayed to May or even later, as Beijing weighs its options over the coming months.

Analysts have interpreted the delay as a sign the summit might not be a priority for the leaders of the three countries, with both Japan and South Korea entangled in their own domestic issues, and China wary of the increasingly close relationships between its neighbours and the United States.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s priorities lie in the ongoing recovery from the severe Ishikawa earthquake in early January, and soothing public outrage over a corruption scandal involving his senior ministers that sent his approval ratings to a record low.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has been preoccupied with next month’s parliamentary election, widely seen as a prelude to the 2027 presidential poll. Failure to win back a parliamentary majority in the April vote would mean three more years of stagnation for Yoon’s People Power Party and his own presidency.

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China agrees to a summit with South Korea and Japan after rare trilateral meeting

“China would like to see how resilient their leaderships would be, because if both leaders fall after the scandal or the election, China needs to reconfigure for new leadership styles in Japan and South Korea,” said Kei Koga, an associate professor with the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.