I didn’t expect much in President Moon’s summit with Xi Jinping in regard to the situation in Hong Kong and Xinjiang Uyghurs as I’ve seen what he said meeting Dutetre and Suu Kyi.
Well, it turned out to be mind-blowing, in a bad way:
The ROK side believes, both Hong Kong affairs and issues concerning Xinjiang are China’s internal affairs.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping Meets with President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea (here for the Chinese version)
I am not saying that Moon should have taken issues with them. We all know what happened after the THAAD deployment. At least he could have tried to avoid them.
Korean press quickly responded. Blue House spokeswoman replied to the queries that Moon just said he had listened well to Xi’s remark that HK and Xinjiang issues are China’s internal affairs.
So what exactly happened?
Dr Sunny Lee of the Sejong Institute wrote an analysis on this issue. He analyzes the lines from the original Chinese press release and says that China seems to have deliberately obscured the subject (The ROK side not Moon) and the verb (Moon listened well to or believes).
Lee also points out that the PRC Foreign Ministry even bothered to describe reporter’s nodding reaction, which Lee says to be rare, when the press officer answered a question on this issue in the proceedings of its regular press conference.
But the most important point Lee raises is that why the ROK Foreign Ministry had done nothing to prevent this. Which also crossed my mind. I don’t know the details about summitry but HK and Xinjiang issues are far from trivia so there had to be some preparation.
This would be yet another lousy diplomatic job which the Moon administration has been having plenty of this kind in recent days.