On Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet with his South Korean colleague Lee Jae Myung to conclude an Asian summit where Beijing and Washington decided to end their trade war.
Xi will meet with Lee on the fringes of this year's APEC (Asia Pacific Cooperation Organization) summit in Gyeongju on the last day of his first visit to South Korea in more than ten years.
Following their meeting in the neighboring city of Busan on Thursday, Xi and Trump decided to scale back a trade spat that has upset markets and interfered with international supply chains.
After those discussions, Trump decided to go back to the United States, enabling the Chinese leader to take center stage at a summit where he has portrayed Beijing as the guardian of the global order against "hegemonism".
The first official discussions between the leaders of the two nations since 2017 took place on Friday when Xi met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines.
He urged Carney to travel to China and assured the Liberal leader that he was committed to cooperating to put relations back on the "right track".
For the first time since her appointment last month, Xi also had a meeting with Sanae Takaichi, the premier of Japan. She claimed to have expressed her desire for a "strategic and mutually beneficial relationship between Japan and China" to Xi.
However, she told reporters that it was "important for us to engage in direct, candid dialogue" and that she also brought up a number of difficult matters with the Chinese leader.
In what will be their first in person meeting since Lee's victory in June, the Chinese leader now focuses on the president of South Korea. For a long time, Seoul has walked a tightrope between the United States, a defense guarantor, and China, a major commercial partner.
After Seoul decided to implement the US-made THAAD missile defense system in 2016, relations with China deteriorated. Beijing responded with broad economic reprisals, prohibiting group travel and limiting South Korean companies.
Public sentiment toward Beijing has also deteriorated due to cultural disputes, such as China's claims to the origins of the Korean staple dish Kimchi. "Public opinion matters in foreign policy," Stanford University sociology professor and Korea specialist Gi-Wook Shin told AFP.
"South Koreans have a very unfavorable opinion of China. I guess China doesn't think much of South Korea either," he remarked. South Korea, which also reached a multibillion-dollar economic agreement with the US this week, is still mostly reliant on trade with its large Asian neighbor.
According to Harvard University Asia Center professor Seong Hyon Lee, Lee will probably attempt to "assure Beijing that South Korea's alignment with the United States does not preclude pragmatic economic engagement with China."
According to the South Korean leader, he is eager to "seek a measure of economic stability and a more predictable floor in bilateral relations," as reported by AFP.
Beijing's tight connections to North Korea, which is still officially at war with the South, also cast a shadow over relations. According to Seoul's presidential office, Lee intends to discuss "denuclearisation" and more general peace initiatives on the peninsula with the Chinese leader.
Pyongyang blasted Seoul's aspirations for denuclearization as a "pipedream" that "can never be realized even if it talks about it a thousand times" prior to Lee and Xi's meeting.
