hankyoreh

Choi Yong-jun, the director of the South Korean Foreign Ministry’s Northeast Asian affairs bureau, speaks with his Chinese counterpart, Liu Jinsong, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul on May 22. (Yonhap)

On Monday, China sent a senior Foreign Ministry official to South Korea to express strong regret over the South Korean government’s attitude toward the Taiwan issue.

The presidential office said that it is in close communication with China on this issue, but the problems in diplomatic relations with China, brought along by close diplomacy with the US, seem to be emerging.

Liu Jinsong, the director-general of the department of Asian affairs of the Foreign Ministry, met with his South Korean counterpart, Choi Yong-jun, the director of the South Korean Foreign Ministry’s Northeast Asian affairs bureau on Monday. During the meeting, Liu conveyed Beijing’s regret over South Korea’s attitude toward the Taiwan issue. one day after the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that Liu “set forth solemn positions on China’s core concerns and exchanged views with the ROK side on other matters.”

A South Korean Foreign Ministry official also commented on the outcome of the meeting, saying, “I understand that we had a very wide-ranging, frank and open discussion on mutual and national interests. The meeting lasted nearly three and a half hours.”

In diplomatic terms, “frank and open” means that disagreements and conflicts were expressed unapologetically.

The air between South Korean and Chinese diplomatic officials is quite different from the presidential office’s explanation.

“We are in close communication with [China and Russia] at the highest level,” Kim Tae-hyo, the first deputy head of the National Security Office, said in an interview with YTN the day before.

The Chinese government’s move is a clear indication of its displeasure with Yoon’s foreign policy of aligning with the US, which aims to contain China. Yoon threw his weight behind the US-led containment of China by agreeing to “trilateral cooperation on engagement with the Pacific Island nations and Indo-Pacific strategies” at a summit with the leaders of the US and Japan on the sidelines of the G7 summit. He made no mention of strengthening cooperation with China in his headline remarks at a Cabinet meeting that reviewed the outcomes of the G7 summit.

China and South Korea called their ambassadors to exchange protests after Yoon was quoted in Reuters on April 20 as saying that tensions in the Taiwan Strait “occurred because of the attempts to change the status quo by force, and we together with the international community absolutely oppose such a change.”

Official high-level exchanges between China and South Korea have all but ceased since the two countries held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November 2022.

Foreign Minister Park Jin of South Korea has only had one phone call with Foreign Minister Qin Gang of China, who took office in late December 2022 and the two have not yet held a face-to-face meeting.

The US and Japan, on the other hand, have kept their diplomacy channels with China open even as they butt heads with it. Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa of Japan met with Qin in Beijing in April, while White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with Wang Yi in Vienna, Austria, on May 10-11 to resume bilateral talks that were interrupted after the February balloon incident. The two countries’ commerce and trade ministers are scheduled to meet in Washington this week.

Some in and out of political circles say Yoon needs to get a handle on public relations.

“There have been tensions between South Korea and China since Yoon’s Reuters interview,” said Lee Nam-joo, a professor of Chinese studies at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. “The meeting at the state level confirms that China is closely paying attention to relevant issues on South Korea’s end.”

Yoo Seong-min, a former lawmaker for the People Power Party, wrote on Facebook that “strengthening the South Korea-US alliance is the right way to go, but we must also secure the freedom to engage in economic exchanges with China.”

By Shin Hyeong-cheol, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]