Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks following his arrival at Macau International Airport in Macau, China, on 18 December 2019, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the former Portuguese colony's return to China. Reuters/Jason Lee
Reuters
BEIJING, China, 23 December 2019
The leaders of Japan and South Korea will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Monday, amid heightened concern North Korea may be about to return to confrontation with Washington.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will meet Xi separately before going to the southwestern city of Chengdu for a trilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.
Though various economic matters will also be on the agenda – as well as tensions between Seoul and Tokyo – North Korea appears likely to dominate the agenda.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un held a meeting of top military officials to discuss boosting the country’s military capability, state news agency reported on Sunday.
North Korea has set a year-end deadline for the United States to change what it says is a policy of hostility amid a stalemate in efforts to make progress on their pledge to end the North’s nuclear programme and establish lasting peace.
Kim and US President Donald Trump have met three times since June 2018, but there has been no substantive progress in dialogue while the North demanded crushing international sanctions be lifted first.
On Saturday, the state media said the United States would “pay dearly” for taking issue with the North’s human rights record and said Washington’s “malicious words” would only aggravate tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
US special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun met with two senior Chinese diplomats during his two-day visit to Beijing last week, following similar meeting in South Korea and Japan days earlier, as diplomats make last-ditch attempts to prevent new confrontation.
Beijing, jointly with Russia, proposed last week that the United Nations Security Council lift some sanctions in what it calls an attempt to break the current deadlock and seek to build support.
But it’s unclear whether Beijing can convince Seoul and Tokyo to break ranks from Washington, which has made its opposition clear and can veto any resolution.
Though South Korea sees China as instrumental in reviving negotiations, it has so far sidestepped questions on whether it supports the new proposal by Beijing and Moscow. Japan, which has historically been a staunch supporter of sanctions against North Korea, has also refrained from commenting on the proposal.
China and Japan have a long history of animosity, especially after the Second World War. Communist China has effectively used this to their full advantage by arousing nationalism as a tool to unite the Chinese after communism was discredited in the early nineties. Each time there is a national crisis, they used the anti-Japanese sentiment to calm down tensions. The immense amount of aid the Japanese provided to an improvised China in the seventies and eighties are all but forgotten by the CCP.
Today, China is isolated with the trade war with the US and it needs to look somewhere for their economy. So, owing to the need of the hour and also using the cooling of US-Japan relationship, the CCP is playing their usual power game. Its ambition is to detach Japan from the US alliance and isolate it. With Trump’s demand to both Japan and Korea to pay for the expenditure of US forces in both countries, it has cooled their relationship. China is using this opportunity to get maximum benefit to sign free-trade agreements with Japan and possibly Korea, and bring them to its own orbit. It’s a double-edged strategy to fulfill its economic interest and simultaneously attempt to drive a wedge between the US and its two most important Asian allies.
However, the issue of the Senkuka islands which are claimed by China and alleged “Japanese war atrocities” are real obstacles between China and Japan to make any meaningful headway. Japan is weary of Chinese intentions and PM Abe has bolstered Japanese self-defence army and has been trying hard to revoke Article 9 of the constitution in order to allow Japan to be capable of defending homeland and also participate in offensive expeditions in other countries. But the Japanese public has been lukewarm for such ventures for fear of repeating history.