President Lee Jae-myung is taking action to ease tensions between South Korea and the People’s Republic of China, hoping to enlist the regional power’s help improving relations with the regime to their north.
Lee made this goal explicit during his phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday, in which he called on the foreign government to help his administration roll back nuclear escalation with North Korea.
“President Lee requested China to play a constructive role for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and peace and security,” presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung told reporters. “President Xi in response said the Chinese side would make efforts for the resolution of the issues … as they are matters of common interest to the two countries.”
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered their own readout of the conversation, which avoided directly acknowledging the issue of North Korean denuclearization but did emphasize a desire to “inject more certainty into the fast-changing and uncertain regional and international landscape.”
According to the ministry, Xi noted on their phone call that “the [China and South Korea] have risen above differences in ideology and social systems” and he expressed openness to promoting “good neighborliness and friendly ties.”
It’s part of the larger charm offensive that Lee promised while campaigning for high office.
He vowed to work more closely with Beijing to “deter North Korean nuclear and military provocations while opening communication channels and pursuing dialogue and cooperation to build peace on the Korean Peninsula.”
There is already some cautious optimism as Pyongyang seems to be quietly following Seoul’s lead — exemplified by the newfound silence on their shared border.
South Korea ceased broadcasting propaganda across the Demilitarized Zone on Wednesday, cutting the audio feeds that previously blared South Korean news, K-pop songs, and anti-regime messages.
In response, North Korea cut their own loudspeakers that evening, which had been blasting political speeches and anti-South screeds.
Even this small step is a massive improvement compared to last year, when Kim Jong Un abandoned all government initiatives seeking reunification of the peninsula, codifying the South as the nation’s greatest enemy.
“I believe that it is a mistake that we must no longer make to deal with the people who declare us as ‘the main enemy’ and seek only opportunities for ‘regime collapse’ and ‘unification by absorption’ by collaborating for reconciliation and unification,” Kim said at the time.
There exists widespread desire among Koreans on both sides of the DMZ for the peninsula to be made whole again. The Korean War traumatized the nation and permanently separated family members from one another. Until the pivot, the diplomatic fiction of “one Korea,” only temporarily separated by conflict, remained.
North Korean authorities have taken extensive actions over the last year and a half to erase any shred of pro-unification imagery from their country.
The regime began dismantling government bodies aimed at reunification, marking their southern neighbors as a foreign nation on maps, and scrubbed references to the peninsula from their national anthem.
The Unification Pavilion — a diplomatic building inside the DMZ that was built in 1985 to facilitate high-level diplomatic discussions — was a prominent victim of this campaign.
The building, which hosted the historic 2018 meeting of then-President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, was stripped of its sign and was changed to Panmun Hall last year, a name denoting the former village that occupied the area before the war.
Moon himself is descended from North Koreans who fled the region during the civil war, and the meeting of the two leaders was believed at the time to signal a real opportunity for cooperation.
Fully overcoming North Korea’s current anti-reunification sentiments will almost certainly require China to play a liaison role, but Lee’s effort to cozy up with the Chinese Communist Party comes at an awkward moment.
A survey conducted earlier this month by the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo and the East Asia Institute found rising anti-China sentiment with 66.3% of the public voicing such views.
TAIWAN POLITICAL PARTIES HIT WITH WIDESPREAD CHARGES OF CHINESE ESPIONAGE
During the presidential campaign, some conservatives accused Lee of seeking to become a stooge of Beijing at the risk of alienating their most important ally — the United States.
Those fears might have been misguided, as the White House seems open to once again getting involved in cross-DMZ diplomacy.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt affirmed on Wednesday that President Donald Trump “remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong Un.”
Trump and Kim maintained a highly publicized love-hate relationship in the president’s first term. The president became the first U.S. leader to set foot into North Korea in 2019, but progress on peace talks eventually stalled due to souring relations.