South Korea is planning to hold a trilateral summit with Japan and China in May, resuming the talks, which had not been held since 2019 due to strained Tokyo-Seoul ties over wartime labor issues and the COVID-19 pandemic, diplomatic sources said Thursday.
South Korea, the current rotating chair of the trilateral dialogue, had been seeking to host it in 2023 or in April this year, according to the sources.
The countries last held the three-way summit in December 2019.
Ties between Tokyo and Seoul hit a low after South Korea's Supreme Court in 2018 ordered two Japanese firms to compensate South Korean plaintiffs over wartime forced labor during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
The sources said the leaders of the three Asian neighbors are likely to discuss economic cooperation and regional issues, such as North Korea's nuclear and missile threats, with South Korea and Japan hoping to prod China to use its influence over Pyongyang to address concerns related to the North.
The foreign ministers of South Korea, Japan and China held in-person talks in November in Busan, where they agreed to speed up efforts to arrange a summit of their leaders at an early date.
Leaders from the three nations had been meeting regularly on the fringes of international conferences since 1999 and have been rotating their hosting duties in standalone summits since 2008.
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