South Korea’s foreign minister’s visit to China, brought clashes on the US missile defence shield. The longstanding security differences do not seem to come to an end.
photo source: Korea Herald
China & South Korea got into a talk on Wednesday in Beijing. After which a disagreement came in between the countries over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system installed in South Korea.
Park Jin, Foreign Minister of South Korea & Wang Yi, his Chinese counterpart met on Tuesday. In the meeting, they explored possibilities to reopen denuclearisation negotiations with North Korea & start cultural exports.
The visit of Mr, Park was apparently a smooth & constructive one. But the six-year-old deployed missile system clashed the interests. This eventually undermined the efforts of the new government to overcome the longstanding security differences.
China conflict explained
South Korea 2016 announced the deployment of THAAD, which is a powerful radar & missile system.
After the deployment of the US missile shield, China contended its position by curbing all the trade & cultural imports with South Korea. This dealt a major blow to the relations between the countries.
As the new government came into power in South Korea with Suk-yeol becoming the President it was expected that the years-long stand-off would come to an end.
For the same reason, South Korea sent its Foreign Minister Park Jin to talk with Wang Yi. The visit went smooth & they explored ways to reopen the considerations of resuming cultural exports & denuclearisation in North Korea.
What went wrong
Apparently, on Thursday South Korean officials told the media that they could not come on the same page with China after the country demanded to halt any more deployments of batteries & limit the use of previous ones.
China has its own arguments saying the strong missile system is a threat to the air defence of their country. While South Korea argues that THAAD is a means of self-defence which is not meant to threaten any state. So, limiting & halting it could lead to a gap in their own air defence & hence it’s non-negotiable.
To surge the ongoing heat, President Yoon Suk-yeol vowed to abandon all of the previous government promises of not increasing THAAD deployments & not participating in a US-led global missile shield or creating a trilateral military alliance involving Japan.
