By Kang Hyun-kyung
South Korea’s ties with the United States may be viewed as “couldn’t be better” nowadays, but its relations with China have hit a low point, a liberal party lawmaker commented Monday.
Rep. Kim Dong-cheol of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) claimed that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put top policy priority on bolstering ties with its closest ally after Lee Myung-bak was sworn in as president in February 2008.
“The foreign policy approach leaning toward the United States will likely come at the price of worsening ties with China, South Korea’s largest trade partner,” he said in a press release circulated to reporters before the National Assembly’s annual inspection of the foreign ministry.
Citing a Chinese media report, Kim described South Korea’s current relations with China as at their lowest in the 18-year history of bilateral diplomatic relations.
In its editorial, a Chinese newspaper, which he referenced, called on the Korean government to rethink its strategy of boosting the alliance with the United States for the sake of security in Northeast Asia.
The Korean peninsula will become unstable if the alliance with the U.S. works against Seoul’s trust-based relations with neighboring nations, and as a result tensions could mount, the editorial was quoted as saying.
The lawmaker pointed his finger at Chinese bloggers’ discontent with Korea’s foreign policy and mentioned possible consumer boycotts of made-in-Korea goods as evidence of brewing anti-Korea sentiment in China.
“It appears that Korea-China relations nowadays can be best described as couldn’t be worse,” Kim said.
Since China became South Korea’s number one trading partner in 2003, bilateral trade has rapidly grown. About 20 percent of South Korea’s overseas investments went to the world’s number two economy.
To the contrary, the South’s bilateral trade with the United States and Japan has fallen over the past decade.
Amid growing trade between Seoul and Beijing, a multi-national investigation team said North Korea sank a South Korean warship, Cheonan on March 26 which killed 46 sailors.
The maritime attack has made South Korea’s ties with the United States even closer as the latter consistently backed the former at the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) after the South brought the case there for international judgment.
The UNSC adopted a presidential statement condemning the attack on the warship, but came short of naming North Korea as responsible.
Experts imply the role of China behind the relatively weak UNSC statement.
China fears instability on the Korean Peninsula because its economic growth will be negatively affected, and therefore the global economic powerhouse strategically sided with the North at the UNSC, they said.
In the wake of the UNSC statement, Korea and the United States agreed to launch joint naval exercises in the East and West seas to discourage the North from another act of provocation.
The show of force in the West Sea angered China, leading to tensions with the United States.