CaliToday (01/11/2025): Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to meet his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jae Myung, on Saturday, capping a week of high-stakes diplomacy at the APEC summit that saw Beijing and Washington forge a fragile truce in their long-running trade war.
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| On the final day of his first trip to South Korea in over a decade, Xi will sit down with Lee on the sidelines of the APEC summit, held this year in the city of Gyeongju (Handout) |
The meeting, the first formal sit-down between the two leaders since President Lee's election in June, is seen as a critical test of South Korea's ability to navigate its precarious diplomatic balancing act. Seoul is now under immense pressure to repair its relationship with its top trading partner, China, without alienating its primary defense guarantor, the United States.
President Xi's visit, his first to South Korea in over a decade, comes as he enjoys a commanding position at the Asia-Pacific Cooperation (APEC) summit. After a pivotal meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in the nearby city of Busan on Thursday, where the two leaders agreed to de-escalate their trade dispute, Trump departed for Washington.
His early exit left the Chinese leader to dominate the summit's final days, where Xi has consistently framed Beijing as the true defender of the multilateral order against "hegemonism" a thinly veiled critique of U.S. foreign policy.
Xi's Charm Offensive
With the U.S. trade truce secured, Xi has embarked on a "charm offensive" to stabilize relations with key U.S. allies.
On Friday, Xi held his first formal talks with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney since 2017, telling the Liberal leader he was determined to get relations back on the "right track" and extending an invitation to visit China.
He also sat down with Japan's new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi. While Takaichi stressed a desire for a "mutually beneficial" relationship, she also told reporters she had raised a number of "thorny issues," emphasizing the need for "candid dialogue" on Beijing.
A High-Stakes Balancing Act
Now, Xi turns his attention to South Korea, a nation that has struggled to find its footing between the two superpowers.
Relations with Beijing remain deeply scarred by the 2016 decision to deploy the U.S-made THAAD missile defense system. China, which viewed the system's powerful radar as a direct threat to its own national security, responded with a sweeping campaign of economic retaliation. Chinese group tours to South Korea were banned, and South Korean businesses were crippled.
This economic coercion, combined with cultural spats such as Chinese claims over the origins of the Korean staple Kimchi has caused South Korean public opinion of China to plummet.
"Public opinion matters in foreign policy," Gi-Wook Shin, a Korea expert and sociology professor at Stanford University, told AFP. "Public perception of China in South Korea is highly negative... I suppose the Chinese view of South Korea is not favourable either."
President Lee is expected to use the meeting to reassure Beijing. South Korea's economy, which just this week inked a new multi-billion dollar economic deal with the U.S., remains heavily dependent on trade with China.
Lee's goal will be to "reassure Beijing that South Korea's alignment with the United States does not preclude pragmatic economic engagement with China," said Seong-Hyon Lee, a scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center. He added that the South Korean leader is desperate to "seek a measure of economic stability and a more predictable floor in bilateral relations."
The North Korean 'Spoiler'
Overshadowing the entire meeting is the persistent threat from North Korea, China's enigmatic ally.
Seoul's presidential office confirmed that Lee plans to raise the issue of "denuclearisation" and broader peace efforts with Xi, whose influence in Pyongyang is unmatched.
However, in a move perfectly timed to undercut the diplomacy, Pyongyang issued a sharp rebuke ahead of the meeting. North Korea's state media dismissed Seoul's hopes for denuclearisation as a "pipedream" that "can never be realized even if it talks about it a thousand times," a stark reminder of the complex security challenges that no trade deal can solve.