China, Japan and South Korea pledge to strengthen cooperation and trust, but geopolitical difficulties remain

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On the morning of May 27th, local time in Seoul, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio attended the China-Japan-ROK Leaders' Meeting. After the meeting, the three parties issued official documents such as the "Joint Declaration of the Ninth China-Japan-ROK Leaders' Meeting", "Joint Statement on the Ten-Year Vision of China-Japan-ROK Intellectual Property Cooperation", and "Joint Statement on Future Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response", agreeing to promote the institutionalization of trilateral cooperation and maintain communication and cooperation within multilateral frameworks such as ASEAN and China, Japan and South Korea.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning also said at a media briefing on Monday that "China is willing to take this leaders' meeting as an opportunity to work with South Korea and Japan to strengthen strategic communication, deepen political mutual trust, demonstrate new responsibilities and new actions, promote the steady and long-term development of China-Japan-ROK cooperation, and make greater contributions to regional prosperity and stability."

This station previously reported that this summit was the first high-level meeting of China, Japan and South Korea since 2019. Although the trilateral summit was interrupted due to the epidemic, tensions in East Asia are also continuing to escalate. After US President Biden hosted the historic US-Japan-South Korea summit last year to further consolidate the security relations of the United States with its allies in East Asia, China's move of having Premier Li Qiang replace Supreme Leader Xi Jinping to attend this China-Japan-South Korea summit has attracted attention.

In his public statement at the summit, Li Qiang described the cooperation between China, Japan and South Korea as a "new starting point", but he also stressed that politics should be separated from economic and trade issues, and called for addressing the current problems of trade protectionism and supply chain decoupling.

Reuters quoted Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea, as saying: "The trilateral summit between China, Japan and South Korea is more about reducing friction than reshaping geopolitics." Although China, Japan and South Korea have motivations for constructive engagement such as economics, there is also suspicion and hostility in the relations among the three countries.

The outside world has noticed that against the backdrop of escalating competition between Beijing and Washington, and regional tensions caused by Taiwan and North Korean nuclear issues, Japan and South Korea have determined to establish a closer alliance with the United States, and the United States, Japan and South Korea have also shown unprecedented three-way cooperation in military and other fields. After the Biden administration called on allies to move the supply chain of key products such as semiconductors out of China, the leaders of Japan and South Korea immediately agreed to establish a "transparent and predictable" trade and supply chain environment, which further tested the strategic relationship between the United States, Japan and South Korea.