South Korean President Park Geun-hye sat down to her first summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday after an extended period of deep diplomatic rancour and mistrust. Officials said there were no plans for a joint press conference following the discussions, which began around 10:00 a.m. (0100 GMT) in Seoul.
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“The South Korean side has pinned its hopes on a Japanese compromise over history and the so-called comfort women issue, but it is unlikely to resolve this during the summit”.
(,.) However, Prime Minister Abe’s focus was on building a future-oriented relationship with Seoul.
The meeting came after Abe and Li joined South Korean President Park Geun Hye in saying they are willing to work together again for regional trade and security in their first summit talks in more than three years.
“It was a great achievement that we were able to normalize the cooperation process between Japan, South Korea and China through today’s summit meeting, which was held for the first time in 3½ years”, he added.
Li arrived in Seoul on Saturday for a three-day trip, which also included a trilateral summit with Japanese and South Korean leaders on Sunday.
South Korea and Japan will seek to move past the bitter wartime dispute over “comfort women” as soon as possible.
“Li might try to sneak a comment past Park, like how China would sensibly and carefully handle the South China Sea issue as a matter of its sovereignty”, Kim said.
Tripartite economic cooperation of China, Japan and South Korea, Li said, will benefit regional and global development as a whole.
According to the document, the three countries reaffirmed their commitment to hold the trilateral meeting on a regular basis.
In two separate speeches delivered on Sunday in Seoul, Mr Li signaled that Beijing will set the growth target below this year’s goal of “about 7 per cent”, which looks increasingly hard to fulfill give a lack of momentum into the year-end.
Its progress alone to see Abe and Park in a room together, said Robert Kelly, a professor of political science at Pusan National University in South Korea.
The countries also pledged to restart holding a leaders’ summit every year and push to deepen their economic cooperation by accelerating free trade negotiations among themselves.
South Korea, China, Japan and North Korea are all members of now-dormant global negotiations on ending Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.
North Korea was on the agenda at Sunday’s three-way meeting.
Lurking in the background are growing military tensions in the South China Sea between China and the United States, which is the chief military ally of both South Korea and Japan.
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US Defense Secretary Ash Carter called on North Korea to shrink and eventually eliminate its nuclear weapons program, while acknowledging during a visit yesterday to the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas that prospects for reconciling with the defiant North are dim. The two will discuss the ongoing confrontation with aggressive North Korea, which has been flaunting its nuclear capabilities lately.
