G20 bilateral talks unlikely for Xi-Abe, hopes for Park meeting remain
As China, Japan and South Korea on Sunday failed to fix a date for upcoming trilateral foreign ministers' talks, analysts said hopes for a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his South Korean counterpart Park Geun-hye on the sidelines of the G20 still remain, although the prospects of a similar meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe look bleak.
Liu Zhenmin, deputy Chinese foreign minister, met with Takeo Akiba and Kim Hyoung-zhin, his Japanese and South Korean counterparts, on Sunday in Tokyo to prepare for a foreign ministers' gathering.
But the three failed to reach a consensus on fixing the gathering envisioned for this week, Japan's Kyodo News Agency quoted Akiba as saying.
Tensions have flared up this year following Seoul's deployment of an advanced US missile shield system and Tokyo's involvement in South China Sea disputes.
According to analysts, the Japanese and South Korean governments planned to use the trilateral foreign ministers meeting to help set up a meeting between their top leaders and Xi on the sidelines of the G20 summit scheduled for September 4-5 in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province.
"It depends on the wisdom and minds of the superpowers, and the ongoing diplomatic exchanges and developments," Yang Bojiang, director of Japanese studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
But he said he is more optimistic about China's relations with South Korea than with Japan, saying that China has no "structural conflicts" with South Korea.
The annual China-Japan-South Korea Foreign Ministers Meeting, which was resumed last year after a three-year suspension due to diplomatic rifts, is likely to be postponed this year.
The meeting, established in 2007, is part of a mechanism for the three East Asian countries to discuss issues including cooperation, leaders' meeting preparation and major regional and global issues.
Japan is this year's coordinator of the mechanism.
U.S. role
The U.S. has played a major role in the strained tensions between Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul, said Huang Dahui, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the Renmin University of China.
"Believing that Chinese development will suppress its growth, the U.S. adopted the rebalance to Asia-Pacific strategy. Instead of coming forward, it incites its allies and intensifies regional tensions," Huang told the Global Times.
Da Zhigang, director of the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, agrees.
"The freezing of trilateral relations between China, Japan and South Korea is actually the U.S.' strategic target," Da told the Global Times.
China originally planned to send assistant foreign minister Kong Xuanyou to Japan in mid-August to help prepare for Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's meeting with his counterparts in Tokyo. But China suspended the visit at the last minute.
Quoting unidentified sources, the Asahi Shimbun reported that Tokyo's repeated protests against Chinese government vessels off the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea were one cause.
China started to send vessels to patrol the waters around the Diaoyu Islands in September 2012, in response to the Japanese government's "nationalization" of the islands. In the past month, China has conducted five patrols in the region, which sparked strong protests from Japan.
Sino-Japanese relations saw an improvement in 2014 when Abe met with Xi in Beijing during APEC.
Relations worsened again this year especially when Tokyo urged Beijing to adhere to the South China Sea arbitration ruling that was unilaterally initiated by the Philippines.
"Japan has assertively meddled in the dispute in the South China Sea, where it is neither a directly concerned party nor a country in the region," Yang said.
"This will become a new factor disturbing Sino-Japanese relations. Japan will not give up its attempts to stress maritime laws at bilateral or multi-party meetings and to besiege and contain China," Yang noted.
