Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) first visit to the Korean Peninsula as the nation’s leader is to Seoul, not Pyongyang, meaning that North Korea’s best friend has snubbed it for its most bitter rival. A flurry of recent rocket and missile tests, the latest yesterday, has made the North’s displeasure crystal clear.
Xi’s choice to meet with South Korean President Park Geun-hye today over North Korean leader Kim Jong-un upends past practice — ever since Beijing and Seoul forged diplomatic ties in 1992 — to put Pyongyang first. It highlights Beijing’s interest in nurturing booming economic ties with Seoul, while sending Pyongyang a message about its destabilizing pursuit of nuclear weapons.
For Washington and the region, it also underlines China’s growing influence on the southern side of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
Beijing, entangled in hostile territorial disputes across Asia, may see an opportunity to boost its influence with the rare neighbor that feels generally positive about China.
“In some ways the budding closeness between Xi and Park echoes much older patterns in East Asia, when China exercised a relatively benign hegemony over many of its neighbors,” said John Delury, an expert on China and Korea at Seoul’s Yonsei University.
In the week before Xi’s visit, North Korea has fired seven short-range projectiles, including two launched yesterday into waters off its east coast. Analysts said they are a message of anger directed at Xi’s choice of Seoul over Pyongyang.
The two-day summit will be Park’s fifth meeting with Xi since she took office early last year.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) urged reporters not to “over-read” Xi’s decision to visit South Korea before the North.
However, many in China see the visit as not only a remarkable departure from the past, but also a sign of a budding friendship between the leaders. Much has been made of Park’s visit to Beijing last year and Xi’s decision to send Park birthday wishes earlier this year.
Money has long been the focus of the relationship between China, the world’s second-largest economy, and South Korea, the fourth-biggest economy in Asia.
They are in talks on a bilateral free-trade agreement. China is South Korea’s largest trading partner and Seoul said two-way trade topped US$220 billion last year. That is larger than the combined value of South Korea’s trade with the US and Japan.
There is also a shared distaste for Japan’s more assertive military ambitions, and for what Beijing and Seoul see as an attempt by Tokyo to obscure its brutal history in both countries in the last century.
Managing security matters, and more specifically North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to carry them, has always been trickier. China is seen as having unusual leverage with hard-to-read North Korea and is often pressed to do more to force change.
“Xi’s visit tests close US ties with South Korea and Japan that Beijing believes have been used to check its rise,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a professor of North Korea studies at Seoul’s Dongguk University. “It also tells Pyongyang that it could lose Chinese support if it sticks to its nuclear ambitions.”
“They will not feel good about this,” Koh said.