The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [139]
The year 1991 was crucial in the revision of China's policy. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping's travels in southern China, the Beijing regime regained the confidence and momentum it had briefly lost in the bloody tumult of Tiananmen Square two years earlier. Once more it attuned its diplomacy to the external sources of capital, markets, and technology for rapid economic growth, which meant the capitalistic nations of North America, and Western Europe-and South Korea, just across the Yellow Sea. Unproductive ideological commitments, such as that to North Korea, slipped down on the priority list.
In May 1991, during Premier Li Peng's official visit to Pyongyang, China changed its basic trade policy with Pyongyang from concessional and barter exchanges to trade based on convertible currency at international prices. The new policy was implemented over a twoyear period. It was on the same trip to Pyongyang that the Chinese premier officially informed Kim Il Sung of the decision not to veto South Korea's entry into the United Nations.
Later that year, Seoul's new status as a full member of the world body provided a venue and a rationale for upgrading Sino-South Korean ties. Immediately after its UN entry (and that of North Korea) in September 1991, Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen met for the first time with South Korean foreign minister Lee Sang Ok in a UN conference room in New York. Although Qian was noncommittal about early normalization of bilateral relations, the meeting itself was unprecedented, and a landmark.
On November 21, Foreign Minister Qian became the first Chinese official to meet Roh Tae Woo, when he traveled in Seoul on the occasion of the third general meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Coordination organization (APEC), a new and broadly inclusive institution that provides a forum for high-level discussions in Asia. As host for the meeting, South Korea had rendered great service to China by adroitly working out arrangements for Taiwan and Hong Kong to participate in this and future meetings alongside the representatives of Beijing, and doing so in a manner that was politically acceptable to all sides. This won China's gratitude and created a desire to respond.
Roh, who had prepared extensively for the session, observed that the Korean relationship with China "had a 5,000 year history, going back to ancient days, of good neighbors closer to each other than any other country" and that the period of severed relations since World War II was without precedent and cause for shame. He reminded Qian that in the sixteenth century Korea refused to permit the Japan warlord, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, to use Korean territory to stage an attack on the Chinese Ming dynasty-after which the Japanese invaded Korea and laid waste to the peninsula.
Roh assured his visitor that "we fully understand China's loyal relationship with North Korea that was forged through the Korean war." Nonetheless, he went on, "I believe that China, [South] Korea and North Korea can build a relationship without betraying that loyalty. As I have stated several times, we are not thinking, not even in dreams, of a German style unification by absorption, which North Korea is worried about. What we want to do with North Koreans, who are of the same nation, is to abandon hostility and restore confidence and to establish a cooperative relationship. It is not our position to dominate them based on our economic power."
Qian responded by addressing the