LONDON -- At their summit meeting in Beijing last week, Presidents Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea and Hu Jintao of China agreed to push for a summit declaration on the establishment of a free trade area (FTA) among South Korea, China and Japan.
The three-way summit is an annual event that takes place on the sidelines of the regular meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the ASEAN-plus-Three meetings. This year these meetings will take place in Bali, Indonesia, in October.
This is nothing new. Such proposals have been made regularly on the sidelines of ASEAN meetings for some years now. They usually call for studies to be carried out by research institutes in the three countries. Last year former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji proposed that the study meetings be raised to the level of business groups in the three countries.