U.S. and Chinese diplomats shuttled to each other’s capitals for consultations this quarter on a rich agenda of bilateral issues and regional and international security matters, including North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Taiwan, and curbing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  The pace of China-U.S. military exchanges accelerated with visits to Beijing by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers, the holding of the Defense Consultative Talks, and a U.S. port call to Shanghai.  At the same time, friction mounted on trade and human rights as the U.S. filed the first case against China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and introduced a resolution condemning Chinese human rights practices for the first time in three years at the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. The disputed presidential election in Taiwan captured attention and elicited concern in both Beijing and Washington, although their responses diverged considerably.

Contrary to expectations, the six-party talks on the nuclear issue with North Korea failed to reach an agreement or even release a joint statement after several days of negotiations in late February.  North Korea balked at accepting the eventual “complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement” of its entire nuclear program, which would have included ending any future capability for peacefully generating nuclear energy.  Had North Korea agreed to the goal of dismantlement, the U.S. was reportedly prepared to accept Pyongyang’s offer to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy assistance that South Korea, Russia, and China would have supplied.

Despite the inability of the talks to take any substantive first steps, the U.S. positively assessed the meetings as making a “good deal of progress,” especially in their agreement to “institutionalize” the process of negotiation by establishing working groups.  The U.S. was also pleased that Russia and China endorsed for the first time, the U.S. goal of fully dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, verifiably and irreversibly.

Looking toward the next round of talks, scheduled to occur no later than the end of June, it will fall mainly to China to bridge the U.S. and North Korean positions.  If China fails to broker an agreement, the continuing impasse in the negotiations, in the context of the U.S. presidential campaign, may ratchet up significant domestic political pressure on U.S. President George W. Bush to take tougher measures against North Korea.

On other security issues, South Korea’s National Assembly approved, during this quarter, President Roh Moo-hyun’s proposal to dispatch 3,000 Korean troops to Iraq to assist U.S.-led coalition forces. The original deployment plans were scuttled by the violence in Iraq and are being reassessed. U.S. and South Korean defense officials also continued their consultations on how best to carry out the agreed transfer of the U.S. military command from central Seoul to a more southern location by 2007.

Finally, in U.S.-Korea trade talks, negotiators temporarily settled a dispute over South Korea’s pending adoption of a new single national standard for accessing the internet through cell phones.  If South Korea were to adopt this standard, it would shut a major U.S. company, which has developed an alternative technology for the same purpose, out of the Korean market.

On the surface, U.S.-Russian relations continued the downward spiral that marked the chilly fall months.  Bush administration and U.S. government criticism of Russia’s March 14 presidential elections was thinly veiled, and the international press had a field day decrying both the electoral process and the outcome.  In spite of this heightened friction, structural factors continue to keep the two countries’ relations from plummeting to extreme depths.  Although energy cooperation has eased to some extent, the all-important war on terrorism, and the drive against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are issues of great importance to both nations, and a successful prosecution of both struggles is a goal shared by both Moscow and Washington. Ironically, democratic elections can prove divisive in diplomatic relations as the most recent one in Russia demonstrated. With an upcoming presidential election in the United States, Russia could again become a whipping post for the U.S.

Despite Southeast Asia’s treaty commitment to a nuclear weapons free zone, the interdiction of nuclear centrifuges bound for Libya manufactured by a Malaysian company reveals that the region is not immune to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation.  Communal violence in southern Thailand and continued Muslim-based militance in Indonesia and the southern Philippines reinforced U.S. efforts to cooperate with these governments in tracking down militants and/or to help negotiate compromises to defuse militancy.  However, America’s continued presence in Iraq has complicated relations with Indonesia where forthcoming elections have led President Megawati Sukarnoputri to publicly distance herself from U.S. policy.  Southeast Asian discontent with the United States is exacerbated by Washington’s continued refusal to permit direct access by regional investigators to captured Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) leader Hambali who remains exclusively in U.S. custody.

There was a lull in the mutual courtship between China and Southeast Asia during the first quarter of 2004, following a year of intense activity and the declaration of a “strategic partnership” at the Bali summit in October. The pause allowed some old problems to resurface, and drew attention to new ways in which China’s rise is impinging on its southern neighbors. Early tariff reductions under the China-ASEAN free trade negotiations, which China had touted as concessions to benefit the ASEAN countries, drew protests from exporters in Thailand and Vietnam, whose products faced frustrating obstacles in China’s southern provinces. Nongovernmental organizations in lower Mekong countries complained that China’s dam construction had drastically reduced the Mekong River’s flow to Cambodia and Vietnam, spoiling ricefields and fisheries and raising the specter of future conflict over water.  China took unusual steps to deal with the flow of drugs and HIV/AIDS from Burma into Yunnan, while avian flu, dengue fever, and other cross-border threats underlined the need for more transparency and cooperative action.  Beijing, Hanoi, and Manila tussled verbally over competing claims to the Spratly Islands, demonstrating again the failure of the 2002 China-ASEAN South China Sea declaration to calm the waters.  China-Southeast Asia relations remain on track for further development, but Beijing would be well advised to take seriously nongovernmental complaints about the effects of its actions, especially in the case of Mekong development.

The presidential campaign and referendum issue dominated cross-Strait relations this quarter. Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian’s narrow reelection victory gives him a weak mandate to lead a society deeply divided over the issue of Taiwan’s national identity and future relationship with China. The election outcome reflects the extent to which opinion on Taiwan has moved away from the “one China” concept in the eight years since Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996. With the campaign over, President Chen now faces concrete choices about how to pursue cross-Strait relations, and Beijing is confronted with difficult choices and the need to review its policies toward Taiwan.  Washington can expect to be caught in the middle and to be challenged to find effective ways to deter President Chen from changing the cross-Strait status quo.

As in the final quarter of 2003, the start of a new year saw no dramatic developments in inter-Korean ties, either positive or negative. The quarter’s main event was multilateral rather than bilateral, as a second round of six-party talks – the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia – at last convened in Beijing in late February. The hoped-for semi-institutionalization of this multilateral forum – assuming it happens and deepens over time, both of which are big ifs – is bound to impact on all the bilateral relationships tracked by Comparative Connections.

Yet inter-Korean ties look likely to preserve their special character as two halves of a divided nation – hence, technically, neither Korea regards them as foreign relations. That does not mean, however, that they will necessarily deepen; if they do, it won’t be very fast. The nuclear crisis will not prevent cooperation, but it will continue to limit it from Seoul’s side, in part due to pressure from the U.S. to go easy on the carrots while the North remains in nuclear defiance. From Pyongyang’s side, several actions seemed a reversion to old-style game-playing, or at best suggested that North Korea has no immediate wish to further develop North-South ties, but will continue to milk the relatively one-sided and shallow (though regular) channels of contacts that now exist.

China’s hosting of the second round of six-party talks in Beijing at the end of February marked the high point of China’s Korea diplomacy in the first quarter, stimulating a flurry of follow-up diplomatic contacts and shuttle diplomacy involving China and the two Koreas.  PRC Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing made his first visit to Pyongyang on March 25-27, further extending high-level contacts with the top DPRK leadership that now seem to occur about once per quarter. The ROK’s newly appointed Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon visited Beijing on the heels of Li’s visit to Pyongyang in an exchange that has enmeshed the PRC as a critical intermediary in peninsular affairs, which is part of China’s more assertive mediating role in the six-party talks.  But to what end will China play this more active role?

In the meantime, an extended squall over competing interpretations of the historical significance and attachments of the Koguryo kingdom has heated up amid competing attempts by China and the DPRK (backed by South Korean scholarship and the ROK government) to claim the kingdom as part of its history. And competition over raw materials is introducing a new element of competition between South Korea and the PRC over procurement and import of raw materials such as iron ore and other primary items that fuel economic growth in both countries. Despite South Korea’s increasing dependence on expanded exports to China for growth, China is competing with South Korea as both an export competitor and an importer of raw materials in third-country markets.

It was not quite all Yasukuni all the time, but close.  Set off by Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s Jan. 1 visit to the shrine, Yasukuni served as the leitmotif for extensive high-level political and diplomatic exchanges over the first quarter of the year.  Neither the prime minister and his political proxies nor China’s political leaders gave any ground.  As the quarter ended, Koizumi, determined to continue his visits to the shrine, seem resigned to not visiting China if the Chinese did not want him to visit, while the Chinese made it clear that Yasukuni was the problem.

In the meantime, the Self-Defense Forces deployed to Iraq, raising back-to-the-future concerns in Beijing, and a landing by Chinese activists on the Senkaku Islands at the end of March raised nationalist sentiments in both countries. In Japan, suits brought by Chinese nationals seeking compensation for wartime forced labor kept alive the issues of history.  At the end of March, for the first time, the Niigata District Court ruled in favor of Chinese plaintiffs in a case brought against both the Japanese government and a private company.

The good news, as both Koizumi and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao agreed, was economic. Commercial relations rapidly expanded during the quarter, stimulating Japanese growth rates. As a result, Japanese views of China were shifting from “threat” to “market opportunity” as China’s consumers continued to consume made-in-Japan electronics and machine products.

Japan-DPRK relations show no progress on abductions.  In the meantime, the Japanese have passed new sanctions legislation as a birthday gift to Kim Jong-il. Japan-South Korea free trade agreement (FTA) talks gain momentum, as do historical animosities.  Finally, the quarter saw Japanese and South Korean contributions to the Iraq reconstruction effort. The size and substance of this support show that the scope of both these American alliances in Asia has effectively expanded beyond Asia to embrace global issues of common interest.