Intel-sharing pact will hasten confrontation in Korean Peninsula: FM
China warned on Wednesday that an agreement between South Korea and Japan to share sensitive military information on the threat posed by North Korea's missile and nuclear activities will exacerbate a confrontation on the Korean Peninsula.
"[The pact] will add to insecurity and instability in Northeast Asia. It runs counter to the trend of peace and development and the common interests of countries in the region," Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a daily briefing.
Geng added that relevant countries should take seriously the security concerns of regional countries and contribute more to regional peace and stability, rather than the opposite.
"It will allow South Korea to directly share information on Pyongyang obtained by Japan without having to go through the United States. It will help restrain Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development programs," South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-kyun was quoted by the country's Yonhap news agency as saying on Wednesday.
Under the intelligence-sharing agreement, the two countries will share information on Pyongyang's nuclear tests, ballistic missile launches, and the communist regime's military activities, the ministry said.
"The South Korean government signed the intelligence sharing pact despite domestic opposition, and the increasingly right-leaning stance adopted by the [Japanese government] will greatly jeopardize security in East Asia," Lü Chao, a research fellow at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
The pact will dim chances of ending the North Korean nuclear program, Yang Danzhi, an expert on Asia-Pacific strategy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Yang noted that the sharing of intelligence on the China-North Korea border could be a pretext for collecting information on China's border military deployment.
"South Korea and Japan, which used to share intelligence information via the US, have in effect forged a military alliance by signing the pact, strengthening the US-led alliance and further upsetting the strategic balance in Northeast Asia," Lü said.
Yang warned that this pact shows the U.S. has been pushing Seoul and Tokyo to reinforce the once distant ties, posing a greater threat to China.
Seoul went ahead with the deal despite opposition from some political parties and a significant section of the public, who remain bitter over Japan's actions during its colonial rule of Korea from 1910 until the end of WWII, Reuters reported.
The signing of the General Security of Military Information Agreement had originally been expected in 2012, but South Korea postponed it due to domestic opposition.
A survey by Gallup Korea on Friday showed that 59 percent of 1,007 respondents opposed the agreement between the two countries. On Tuesday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye approved the bilateral military information sharing pact.
"Park aimed to win U.S. support and defuse her political crisis, but it will spark more fierce opposition, contrary to her wishes," Lü said.
