North Korea on Monday lashed out at South Korea, Japan, and even Pyongyang’s patron China for supporting the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at a summit in Seoul.
North Korea’s rhetoric was par for the course with regard to South Korea and Japan, but unusually harsh against China, which went out of its way to avoid criticizing the North Korean regime during the summit.
China was less insistent on denuclearization at this weekend’s summit than it was at a similar event held in the Chinese city of Chengdu in 2019. The trilateral meeting issued a statement on Monday that said disarmament and stability on the peninsula are important for all three countries, but avoided the phrase “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, which appeared in the 2019 joint statement.
“We reiterated positions on regional peace and stability, denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the abductions issue, respectively. We agree to continue to make positive efforts for the political settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue,” the new statement said.
“Abductions” refers to North Korea’s horrific policy of kidnapping Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s. A few of the abductees were later returned to Japan, but the Japanese government has long demanded a full accounting of all of their fates. North Korea periodically claims to be “investigating” the matter, without results.
Shigeru Yokota, bottom left, wipes tears as he and his wife Sakie, right, speak during a press conference in Tokyo in September, 2002, after they were informed that their daughter Megumi, abducted to North Korea in the 1970s, had died. (Kyodo News via AP)
Shortly before the trilateral statement was issued, Japan announced that North Korea has informed it of an impending “satellite launch,” to be conducted before June 4. North Korea’s satellite launches are widely seen as tests of illegal ballistic missile technology.
Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol urged North Korea to cancel the satellite launch during the summit, while Chinese Premier Li Qiang avoided mentioning it.
South Korea and Japan were also able to squeeze some language into the joint statement declaring the commitment of all three nations to “the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and to an international order based on the rule of law and international law.”
China, a Communist tyranny, certainly feels no obligation to honor those principles and the language was seemingly intended as criticism of Russia for invading Ukraine, an invasion China has stubbornly refused to denounce.
Li evidently valued the trilateral summit’s commitments to economic cooperation – especially on the matter of global supply chains that China is worried about losing to the post-pandemic “de-risking” movement – to let South Korea and Japan insert that language.
North Korea, on the other hand, went berserk on Monday morning, trashing the trilateral summit as a “grave political provocation,” an “insult never to be pardoned,” and a “declaration of war against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).” DPRK is the North Korean regime’s preferred name for itself.
North Korea’s foreign ministry railed that even the watered-down call for denuclearization in the 2024 summit statement was a “violation” of its sovereignty and an insult to the “unanimous will of all the Korean people.”
There was some other trouble at the summit unrelated to North Korea. Japanese PM Kishida expressed “serious concern” about China’s intimidating military drills around Taiwan after the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te last week.
Li’s frosty response was that interfering with China’s handling of Taiwan would cross a “red line” for Beijing. The trilateral statement released on Monday included no references to Taiwan.
Japan and China also quarreled over the latter’s ban on Japanese seafood, imposed after Japan began releasing wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear reactor in the summer of 2023.
Chinese purchases of Japanese seafood fell to their lowest levels since the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic after the ban was announced. China said it would review the ban at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in November, but it remains in place to this day.
This aerial view shows the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, northern Japan, on Aug. 24, 2023, shortly after its operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings TEPCO began releasing its first batch of treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. (Kyodo News via AP, File)
Kishida once again asked Li to lift the ban at the trilateral summit in Seoul but Li said China still believes the wastewater released from Fukushima could be “nuclear-contaminated.” Li called on Japan to “earnestly fulfill its responsibilities and obligations” to the world on the Fukushima issue, even though international agencies have supported Japan’s wastewater release plan as both safe and necessary.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Monday doubted the issue would be resolved any time soon because Japan is unwilling to make the heavy concessions on other matters that would allow China to back away from its previous statements on the seafood issue without looking weak.
Japan, on the other hand, feels that ceding to some of China’s irrational demands would make Tokyo look weak, and that China would simply come up with new unreasonable demands even if Japan capitulated.
“We feel no will on the Chinese side to make progress on the issue of treated water,” a Japanese official glumly told the SCMP.
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