Moon to tackle THAAD retaliation, export curbs

President Moon Jae-in goes to his seat after shaking hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during a bilateral summit in Chengdu, China, Wednesday. Yonhap

By Park Ji-won

President Moon Jae-in is expected to push harder for resolving pending diplomatic issues surrounding the Korean Peninsula including China's protests over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Japan's export controls, amid the three countries' efforts to take united action toward denuclearization and peace in the region.

"We have agreed to work together for an early resumption of the U.S.-North Korea dialogue in order to achieve substantial progress on denuclearization and peace," Moon noted during a joint press conference after a trilateral summit in the southwestern Chinese city, Tuesday. The leaders of the three countries also adopted a vision statement outlining trilateral cooperation for the next 10 years.

The trilateral summit came at a critical time with denuclearization talks between the U.S. and North Korea hanging dangerously in the balance. But with a certain measure of success Moon has achieved in China, he faces the challenge to smooth out relations with China and Japan in the second half of his tenure.

South Korea and Tokyo had a spat over the handling of the South Korean Supreme Court's 2018 ruling ordering Japanese firms to compensate the surviving South Korean victims of forced labor during World War II and Japan's "retaliatory" measures imposing export controls against South Korea. Beijing has been taking measures including banning Chinese tourists from visiting South Korea to pressure the Korean economy in relation to the deployment of a U.S. THAAD system in South Korea, which China alleges allows the U.S. to spy on its airspace. Seoul has been trying to find breakthroughs to ease such diplomatic and economic uncertainties.

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Experts say the recent summits pave the way to further improve relations between the three Asian countries through diplomacy over each task including China's THAAD retaliation and Japan's export controls.

"The summit between the leaders of South Korea and Japan ended up creating a good result as the two exchanged opinions straightforwardly and agreed to improve their relations and have further talks in the future," Yang Ki-ho, an expert on Korea-Japan relations at Sungkonghoe University, told KBS, Wednesday. Yang added that it was the first time for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to say he wants to improve Seoul-Tokyo relations, implying the relations between the two countries may improve compared to the last two to three years.

"As tensions were unprecedentedly high with South Korea surrounding diplomatic issues including export controls, I was wondering when the situation would come to an end. But at the end of this year, the meeting between Moon and Abe paved the way for both countries to start talks to come up with a compromise," Ha Jong-moon, a professor at Hanshin University, was quoted as saying by local media Wednesday.

Another expert said it is more likely that Chinese leader Xi Jinping may visit South Korea thanks to the trilateral summit, which would send a signal that Beijing would ease its unofficial boycotts against South Korean companies, their products and group tours to Seoul.

Stressing that the Chinese leader has not visited Seoul under the Moon administration and a lift of such bans against South Korea is dependent on Xi's visit here, Gu added, "China will pressure South Korea asking for countermeasures for THAAD issues. Or, Xi may want to get a certain promise over the issue from South Korea during the visit, meaning it is uncertain whether he would visit Seoul."

However, some analysts urged the government to come up with more concrete measures to tackle the current diplomatic feud.

"Thanks to the trilateral summit, the Moon Jae-in administration created momentum and a foothold to resolve strained diplomatic ties on the Korean Peninsula through dialogue. The government may put more attention to tackling China's THAAD issues and Japan's export restrictions," said Shin Beom-chul, senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

"However, it is more important to come up with detailed ways beyond the present diplomatic efforts to resolve the strained relations through dialogue alone."

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