Lessons from the Japan-South Korea-China summit

Any meeting is better than no meeting — that is the consensus on the takeaway from this week’s trilateral summit between Japan, South Korea and China, the first such meeting in five years.

Surely, the primary goal of this summit was to return to some level of talks among the participants. China hopes to use this venue to induce Japan and South Korea to distance themselves from the U.S. and to engage with China at the economic and cultural levels. Japan and South Korea, for their parts, are engaging to avoid the perception that they are being unreasonable.

But the underlying force driving the trilateral summit — which yielded little in substance — is the fact that Beijing needed these talks to happen more than Tokyo and Seoul.

The world has changed dramatically since 2019. The U.S.-China strategic competition has intensified in all domains. China is being cut off from cutting edge technology to prevent Xi Jinping from realizing his "military-civil fusion" aspirations. China’s economy has slowed with youth unemployment reaching over 20%. A property crisis is unfolding there and the situation is worsened by unknown levels of debt in the shadow banking sector, along with various structural and policy decisions. These factors are increasing downward pressure on the Chinese economy.

Furthermore, Beijing has lost many international partners due to various factors: the COVID-19 pandemic; its aggressive "wolf-warrior" diplomacy; coercive actions against Japan, the Philippines, Canada, Australia and Taiwan; its pro-Russia stance on Vladimir Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine while claiming neutrality; and its failure to condemn Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel.

Against this backdrop, Japan and South Korea are diverging from China in areas such as security, diplomacy, technology and economic interests. These convergences and divergences mean that while the trilateral summit offered a great meal, the menu of tangible and sustainable cooperation outcomes was minimal.

China’s economic downturn, pressure from the U.S. and its increasingly severe geopolitical situation is leading Beijing to try to stem its domestic and geopolitical bleeding. Consequently, China attempted to court its neighbors by rekindling talks about a free trade agreement (FTA) among itself, Japan and South Korea. Beijing appealed to Tokyo and Seoul with the comment, "a relative afar is less use than a close neighbor," implying that the U.S. is geographically distant from Japan and South Korea and cannot offer the same benefits that China can.

China attempted to tread carefully at the summit, trying to avoid the impression that it came to lecture Japan and South Korea as subordinate partners in the relationship. What was intriguing, however, was that Beijing demonstrated what can be described as "great power autism" — a situation where powerful nations show a lack of understanding or sensitivity to the perspectives, concerns and interests of other nations. Beijing told both Seoul and Tokyo that their security anxieties about China were misunderstandings or that they were being misled by the U.S. as part of its strategy to maintain hegemony. Premier Li Qiang even emphasized that the supply chains of China and South Korea were "deeply intertwined" and suggested that economic and trade issues should not be politicized or turned into security issues.

Such comments are insulting to both Tokyo and Seoul and reinforce the view in both capitals that Sino-centrism is alive and well in Xi Jinping’s China. They send the message that Tokyo and Seoul do not have autonomy in their foreign policy decisions, which is completely false. Beijing’s comments also suggest that both Tokyo and Seoul lack the ability to make critical judgments about the domestic and international behavior of their neighbor and about the risks that exist to their respective national interests.

In the area of trade, Li suggested that the trilateral FTA was still on the table. However, in reality, the trade agreement between Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing was likely already on life support before the COVID-19 pandemic that began in Wuhan in the autumn of 2019. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, "Japan Inc." has heavily invested in transitioning from electronics to high-tech material manufacturing, including wafers used in advanced semiconductors. South Korea has absorbed many of these industries and China has followed suit with the production of electric vehicles and smartphones.

The key difference is that China can manufacture all the products that South Korea produces faster, cheaper and on a larger scale, posing a threat to the South Korean economy and its flagship industries. This means that an FTA among the three neighbors may not be in South Korea's interest if it means its companies have to directly compete with their Chinese counterparts.

Japan and South Korea both have leverage over China as it navigates its relationship with the U.S. For example, despite the loss of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan continues to expand the influence of the free and open Indo-Pacific framework. Tokyo is gaining more buy-in from like-minded states that aim to uphold an international order based on the rule of law.

Furthermore, Japan has shifted from a China policy that was predominantly focused on engagement to a foreign policy that now includes more deterrence as part of its approach. This shift is exemplified by the 2022 National Security Strategy, which has strengthened Japan's relations with Australia and the U.K. through Reciprocal Access Agreements, deepened its alliance with the U.S. and actively engaged in multilateral forums to promote Taiwan's internationalization as a global public good.

South Korea has also elected a leader who is decidedly pro-U.S. and committed to strengthening relations with Japan through bilateral diplomacy and working with Washington and Tokyo under the framework of the Camp David Principles. Seoul’s shift also includes an articulated Indo-Pacific strategy, a "southbound" policy to invest in Southeast Asia and collaborative efforts to diversify semiconductor production by partnering with the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

Beijing doesn't need a crystal ball to understand that its decadeslong effort to drive a wedge between Tokyo and Seoul and their Washington ally has suffered serious setbacks under Xi. The U.S. is now closer to its allies and partners in the region than it was five, 10 or even 15 years ago, despite the rather lackluster concrete cooperation initiatives stemming from this year's trilateral summit.

Even in regards to the shared concern over North Korea, all three countries are pessimistic about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. They understand that Pyongyang has drawn a valuable lesson from the Ukraine conflict: States with nuclear weapons are less likely to be attacked. China also acknowledges this lesson, providing little incentive for Beijing to pressure Pyongyang to change its policies. By maintaining a known actor in power in North Korea, Beijing can keep the U.S. at bay and force Washington, Tokyo and Seoul to allocate resources toward it rather than China. Japan and South Korea received nothing concrete from China on denuclearization, only rhetoric about contributing together toward peace and stability in Asia.

Going forward, the trilateral meeting will become less significant as the national interests of Seoul and Tokyo diverge from Beijing. The ball is ultimately in Beijing’s court. If China continues its efforts to rewrite the international order based on the rule of law, which is crucial for middle-sized states like Japan and South Korea to prosper and remain secure, Beijing will further push Tokyo, Seoul and other like-minded governments and political entities like in Taipei toward forming a balancing coalition to contain China’s rise.