The foreign ministers of China, South Korea and Japan held a trilateral meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday.
These trilateral talks started in 2012 with the aim of establishing a free trade agreement (FTA) between the three nations. However, they were suspended in 2013 as territorial disputes between China and Japan over islets in the East China Sea escalated and the relationship between Tokyo and Seoul soured over the issue of so-called "comfort women," or women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during World War II.
The talks resumed last year. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met in Seoul last November and agreed to push forward the FTA discussion.
But as North Korea test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan on Wednesday, the issue of Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development has been pushed to the top of the agenda of the trilateral talks.
After the foreign ministers' meeting, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the media that China opposes Pyongyang's nuclear development program, without directly referring to North Korea's missile launch.
Wang also said that China is opposed to "any words and deeds that cause tensions on the Korean Peninsula and all actions that violate Resolution 2270," referring to a UN resolution passed unanimously by the Security Council on March 2 to expand the scope of sanctions against North Korea. At the same time, Wang said that China continues to strive for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and persists in settling such issues through dialogs and negotiations.
The meeting was held at a time when China, Japan and South Korea are themselves at odds over various security issues. While the tension between China and Japan over the territorial disputes in the East China Sea has risen in recent months, China and South Korea have sparred over Seoul's planned deployment of the US's THAAD anti-missile system, which China sees as a threat to its own national security.
As disagreements over security issues continued to eclipse economic and trade cooperation between the three countries, it appeared that no significant progress was made on the FTA front during the meeting.