By JANE PERLEZ
President Xi Jinping of China with President Park Geun-hye of South Korea on Thursday in Seoul.CreditPool photo by Ahn Young-joon
SEOUL, South Korea — The leaders of China and South Korea sent a strong message to North Korea on Thursday saying they were united in their opposition to the development of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula, but they fell short of announcing how they would pursue that goal.
After a three-hour meeting, China’s president, Xi Jinping, and South Korea’s leader, Park Geun-hye, issued a joint statement that smoothed over the differences in approach that have stalled a more aggressive stance toward the unabated development of nuclear weapons by North Korea, and its leader, Kim Jong-un, China’s ally.
Their joint communiqué said the “two countries reaffirm their firm opposition to the development of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula,” phraseology that the Chinese have always preferred because it does not specifically cite North Korea.
With Mr. Xi standing beside her, Ms. Park read a statement that said the two leaders had agreed that the “denuclearization of North Korea must be achieved at all costs,” with the emphasis on the country of North Korea rather than the Korean Peninsula.
The variance in terminology — with China insisting on calling for denuclearization of the whole peninsula — showed the continued reluctance of China to single out the North Koreans and force them to give up their weapons for fear of creating instability that would spill over their borders, Chinese and South Korean analysts said.
Still, on the eve of Mr. Xi’s arrival in Seoul, the South Korean foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, said that the Chinese position could be interpreted as meaning the denuclearization of North Korea.
“China will never make that concession” and drop the reference to the peninsula, said Chung-in Moon, professor of political science at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Just as Mr. Xi’s plane was about to land in Seoul, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, concerned about China aligning itself with South Korea, tried to throw a wrench in the works by announcing that he would lift some sanctions imposed against North Korea. He was doing so, he said, in return for Pyongyang’s pledge to investigate the circumstances of the abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.
The timing of the statement by Mr. Abe was interpreted in Seoul as an attempt to distract from China and South Korea presenting a united front on the behavior of Japan’s military during World War II.
“Abe is afraid of South Korean and Chinese cooperation on Japan’s past,” said Sukhee Han, professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul.
It was possible, Mr. Han said, that Mr. Abe would seek to meet with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in the coming months as a way of upstaging Mr. Xi, who has ignored Mr. Kim and declined to invite him to Beijing, even though North Korea is an ally of China.
Good personal chemistry between Mr. Xi and Ms. Park was on display Thursday on the first day of Mr. Xi’s visit to Seoul. Ms. Park accompanied Mr. Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, to a formal welcoming ceremony and the signing of a visitors’ book, and the two leaders stood together before the press after their meeting on a range of security, economic and cultural issues. It was the fifth time they had met since Mr. Xi became president of China in early 2013.
But beneath the personal warmth lay disagreements on important matters like how to get rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and for Ms. Park, how to deal with Mr. Xi’s new concept of a security architecture in Asia that would be led by China and sideline the United States.
“When you get into the sensitive political matters — the denuclearization of North Korea and Xi Jinping’s ideas for Asia — it gets more difficult,” Mr. Moon said. As expected, Mr. Xi called for the resumption of six-party talks that began in 2003 with the aim of ridding North Korea of its nuclear program but stopped in 2007 after the six nations involved, including the United States, made little progress.
In their joint statement, the two countries pledged to complete a free-trade agreement that would bolster their already booming economic ties. Mr. Xi said that they hoped the accord would be completed within the year, and that annual two-way trade would increase to $300 billion by the end of 2014.
In something of a surprise, Mr. Xi said South Korea had agreed to consider joining the Chinese initiative for an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that Beijing is organizing as a mechanism for a Chinese-led effort to bankroll more infrastructure projects in underdeveloped Asian nations.
The bank, still in the planning stage, is widely seen as an effort by China to create a funding structure to compete with the Asian Development Bank, which is dominated by Japan and the United States.
Ms. Park has insisted that Japan should offer compensation to the victims of its military’s use of Korean and other women as sex slaves during World War II. Similarly, China has a long list of grievances about Japanese atrocities before and during World War II, including the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Nanjing in 1937.
While the leaders did not mention the issue in the main joint statement, an addendum to the main document said the two countries would cooperate on researching data on the issue of the so-called comfort women. And in Beijing, the confessions of 45 Japanese war criminals tried and convicted by military tribunals in China after World War II were published online on Thursday.
The handwritten confessions, along with Chinese translations and abstracts in both Chinese and English, were published on the website of the State Archives Administration, the deputy director of the agency, Li Minghua, said Thursday.
“South Korea and China have been bonding on the history issues for a while,” said John DeLury, professor of East Asian Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Indeed, on the eve of Mr. Xi’s arrival in Seoul, Ms. Park told Chinese state television that a 1993 apology by Japan for the use of Korean and other women by the Japanese military as sex slaves in World War II was insufficient, and that a recent review of that apology by Japan had only served to aggravate the situation. Ms. Park’s government is seeking compensation for 54 Korean women who say they were used as sex slaves.
“South Korea feels there is a clear hierarchy of alliances and the U.S. is focused on giving Abe what he wants, and that makes the South Koreans feel on their own,” Mr. DeLury said. Hence, he said, it was easy for South Korea to turn to China and unite on what are known as the “history issues.”
In China, Mr. Xi’s South Korean trip was granted enthusiastic and plentiful news coverage Thursday that failed to mention differences over how to deal with North Korea.
But the state-run news agency, Xinhua, blasted the United States for its policies toward North Korea, an echo of the unhappiness within the Chinese government at the Obama administration’s refusal to be more flexible toward the North Korean regime. “The crux of the chronic Korean Peninsula predicament lies in the mutual mistrust and hostility between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the United States,” the agency said.
“Washington’s counterproductive obsession with sanctions and intimidation and Pyongyang’s understandable sense of insecurity and unhelpful violations of United Nations resolutions have only exacerbated the feud,” the agency added.
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