November 25, 2023

According to South Korea's Foreign Ministry on November 24, the 10th China-Japan-ROK trilateral foreign ministers' meeting will be held on Sunday in Busan, South Korea. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said on November 21 that "the three sides are in contact on matters related to this meeting." If realized, this will be the first face-to-face meeting of the three foreign ministers in more than four years. More importantly, their meeting, as one of the essential parts of the mechanism of trilateral cooperation, is often regarded as "the last important link" in the preparations for the China-Japan-ROK leaders' meeting. Therefore, the biggest expectation this meeting brings to people is undoubtedly whether it can lay the foundation for the three countries to further promote cooperation and resume the leaders' meeting.

After more than 20 years of development, the China-Japan-ROK trilateral cooperation mechanism, which started in 1999, has gradually formed a system centered on the leaders' meeting and supported by ministerial meetings, senior officials' meetings and more than 70 working-level mechanisms, and has established the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat in Seoul. China, Japan and South Korea, in that order, take turns to assume the presidency, which is currently held by South Korea. In other words, the mechanism is quite mature. The last China-Japan-ROK foreign ministers' meeting was held in Beijng in August 2019, then this mechanism was unexpectedly interrupted by the sudden Covid-19 pandemic. However, over the past four decades, the obstacles to the restart of this mechanism are far more than "natural disasters" such as the epidemic The dramatic changes in the international political landscape have given many people a sense of a "sea change" taking place.

In the midst of this period, there has been a significant increasing involvement of external forces, or the US factor, in East Asia, which has become a dark cloud over the relations among the three countries. The strong involvement of the US as an extraterritorial country in East Asia has changed, interfered with and even destroyed the trilateral cooperation mechanism between China, Japan and South Korea, and the pro-US and pro-Japanese policy pursued by the Yoon administration after it came to power has made South Korea and Japan even more distinctive in the pattern of the two flanks of the US frontline for containment of China. How to balance relations with the US and China, how to deal with the baton from the US, and whether to truly refuse to choose sides and not participate in the confrontation of the blocs are issues that South Korea and Japan cannot avoid, and will inevitably affect the restoration of the China-Japan-ROK trilateral cooperation mechanism.

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