Any meeting is better than no meeting – that is the consensus on the conclusions of this week’s Japan-South Korea-China trilateral summit, the first such meeting in five years.
The main purpose of this summit was undoubtedly to return to some level of conversation between participants. China hopes to use this venue to push Japan and South Korea to distance themselves from the US and engage with China on an economic and cultural level. Japan and South Korea, for their part, are doing everything they can to avoid the perception that they are being unreasonable.
But the underlying force behind the trilateral summit – which yielded little substantive – is the fact that Beijing needed these talks more than in Tokyo and Seoul.
