[Editorial] The Beijing test

President Lee’s China diplomacy probes South Korea’s options for strategic autonomy

In diplomacy, timing is often the clearest form of symbolism. On Sunday, as President Lee Jae Myung boarded his plane for Beijing to end a nine-year freeze in presidential state visits to China, North Korea chose the moment to fire a volley of short-range ballistic missiles.

Beijing rolled out the red carpet; Pyongyang fired a warning shot. Between those two signals lies the real question over Lee’s China trip: whether South Korea can forge a path of strategic autonomy in a region where every gesture is scrutinized and misreadings are historically costly.

Lee’s four-day state visit, the first by a South Korean leader since 2017, came unusually quickly after his meeting with Xi Jinping in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, two months earlier. Such rapid leader-level engagement suggests urgency on both sides. For Seoul, relations with China have been stuck in a diplomatic permafrost since the US-deployed THAAD antimissile battery dispute, hardened by the US-China rivalry and Washington’s technology restrictions. For Beijing, stabilizing ties with a US ally has grown more important as strategic competition deepens.

The visit signals a break from the old shorthand of security with the US and economics with China. That division no longer holds.

Supply chains, AI and semiconductors are now treated as strategic assets, with policy increasingly shaped by resilience and control rather than efficiency. Lee’s case, laid out in his CCTV interview on Friday, is that South Korea needs room to pursue its own interests rather than reflexively aligning with either pole of the great-power rivalry.

His reaffirmation of the "One China" policy fits that realist framing. Seoul has held this position since diplomatic normalization in 1992, and restating it now works as a stabilizer. With Beijing on edge over Taiwan, Lee’s insistence on principle without embellishment distinguishes South Korea from more confrontational regional voices. The aim is to limit friction, not to curry favor.

Strategic autonomy, however, does not excuse silence. The harder test lies where interests collide.

China’s permanent steel structures in overlapping waters of the Yellow Sea raise sovereignty concerns that cannot be dismissed as technical disputes, particularly as maritime boundaries remain contested and crisis-management mechanisms remain underdeveloped. Beijing’s unease over Seoul’s pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines adds another layer of mistrust, recalling how defensive security choices have triggered political and economic retaliation.

More consequential still is North Korea. Recent Chinese military documents have quietly dropped explicit references to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. That omission matters. Lee must persuade Xi that stability without denuclearization is an illusion and that a nuclear-armed North is a persistent liability that complicates deterrence and increases escalation risks. Beijing’s role in nudging Pyongyang back toward dialogue remains indispensable, even if its leverage has waned.

Economics offers a parallel arena for recalibration. During Lee’s visit, more than 10 memorandums of understanding covering artificial intelligence, green energy and future supply chains will signal a shift from vertical dependence to horizontal cooperation. His emphasis on solar energy and advanced technologies aims to anchor the relationship in mutual gain rather than asymmetric reliance.

Lee has proposed institutionalizing annual meetings with Chinese leaders to avert another decadelong freeze. Regularity would lower the stakes and curb the impulse to read symbolic overreach into routine diplomacy. But procedure alone will not suffice. Strategic autonomy will be judged by outcomes, notably China’s role on North Korea and tangible progress on maritime rights and cultural exchanges.

Pyongyang’s missile launch as Lee departed was a cold reminder that the peninsula’s volatility ignores protocol. For this Beijing reset to succeed, South Korea must prove it can act not as a buffer between giants, but as a pivotal actor shaping its own strategic environment.

That test begins in Beijing. Turning this state visit into sustained Chinese cooperation on regional stability will be the clearest measure of Lee’s “pragmatic diplomacy” and the hardest one to pass.