— held a meeting last week. The heads of government for the three countries met in the thriving Chinese city of Chengdu and pledged, among other things, to accelerate their long-standing free-trade negotiations.
Japan remains at the center of all those difficulties. China continues to commemorate the martyrs of entire cities at the hands of Japanese World War II occupiers, while South Korea seethes at the enslavement of its people by the Japanese colonial rule and Tokyo's alleged refusal to pay war reparations.
It was, therefore, an unexpectedly sobering warning from Japan last week that stability in East China Sea was necessary for better ties with China — by far Tokyo's largest trade partner. Predictably, Beijing is bristling at all that and reminding Tokyo that those are China's domestic issues.