The top diplomats of China and Japan arrived in South Korea on Saturday for trilateral talks with their South Korean counterpart on efforts to resume the long-suspended leaders' summit of the three neighbors.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa each landed in the southeastern port city of Busan, the venue for the gathering, in the afternoon.
They will hold separate bilateral talks with Foreign Minister Park Jin on Sunday, before having the three-way talks later that day.
They will attend a luncheon meeting to be hosted by Park between the bilateral and trilateral talks.
During the two-day trip, neither of them is expected to pay a courtesy call on President Yoon Suk Yeol due to scheduling matters.
The three ministers will likely discuss efforts to facilitate the resumption of the trilateral summit among the leaders, which has not taken place since December 2019.
The trilateral summit was last held in China's southwestern city of Chengdu and has not taken place due to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and a deterioration in bilateral relations between Seoul and Tokyo over a longstanding issue of compensating Korean forced labor victims when Korea was a Japanese colony in 1910-45.
Talks of reviving the summit gathered momentum amid a dramatic warming of the Seoul-Tokyo relations after South Korea said in March it will compensate the Korean victims on its own without asking for contributions from Japanese companies.
As the current rotating chair, Seoul has been pushing to host the summit before the end of this year.
North Korea's launch of a military reconnaissance satellite earlier this week and its growing military ties with Russia are also expected to be among the key agenda items at Sunday's talks.
They are also likely to discuss ways to promote three-way cooperation in such areas as climate change, science and digital technologies, and people-to-people exchanges.
It will mark the first visit by Kamikawa since she took office in September. Wang last visited South Korea in September 2021. (Yonhap)
