The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [140]
Roh was ecstatic about the results of the meeting. He reminded his aides that during their interaction over many centuries past, the Korean kings always sent their emissaries to pay court to China, "but this time I received a kowtow" from the Chinese foreign minister.
In January 1992, in the wake of the Roh-Qian meeting and of a formal Sino-South Korean trade agreement signed in December, the Chinese Foreign Ministry held a series of strategic planning meetings that ended with a recommendation for full normalization with Seoul. A Chinese source said that, as a result, the Foreign Ministry listed normalization as one of its priority diplomatic objectives for 1992.
The timing of China's move was still uncertain until Qian confidentially informed the South Korean foreign minister, Lee Sang Ok, on the morning of April 13, 1992, that China was ready to open negotiations leading to full-scale relations. The revelation was made in a conference between the two ministers at the State Guest House in Beijing, where Lee was staying as a participant in a meeting of a UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. The Chinese foreign minister, delivering the news in a matterof-fact and soft-spoken way, emphasized that secrecy was essential.
Qian's declaration caused great excitement in Seoul among the handful of officials who were told of it. The ensuing secret negotiations, including a month-long pause while the Chinese prepared North Korea to absorb this new blow, took only four months. Together with the Korea policy reversal and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea on August 24, 1992, and the state visit of Roh Tae Woo to Beijing two months later created a dramatically changed geopolitical situation around the divided peninsula.
What brought about the Chinese resolve to move quickly, according to sources on both sides, had less to do with the Korean peninsula than with China's sensitivity to developments on Taiwan, where a campaign for greater international recognition had been intensifying. The worldwide flowering of Taiwan's informal and paradiplomatic contacts and visits was disturbing to the leaders in Beijing, and its few breakthroughs were maddening. In January 1992 the Baltic nation of Latvia, newly freed to seek its own destiny by the collapse of the Soviet Union, established official relations with Taiwan, despite intense protests from China. Shortly before the April decision to begin negotiations with South Korea, Beijing learned that the west African nation of Niger had decided to establish full diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The way to retaliate, Chinese leaders reasoned, was to move quickly to establish diplomatic relations with Seoul, thus forcing South Korea to drop its diplomatic ties with Taiwan and depriving Taiwan of its last remaining official toehold in Asia.
Breaking off its diplomatic relations with Taiwan as demanded by China, was no easy task for South Korea. When Taiwanese authorities got wind of the secret PRC-ROK negotiations, they sent a high-ranking envoy, the secretary general of the presidential office, to remind Seoul that the Nationalist governments of China, the lineal ancestors of the current Taiwan regime, had supported the Korean nationalists in exile during the Japanese occupation, had given strong support to the independence of South Korea in UN politics