China understands South Korea’s need to protect its security but Seoul still needs to respect Beijing’s concerns about the deployment of an advanced U. S. anti-missile system, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his South Korean counterpart.
BEIJING: China understands South Korea’s need to protect its security but Seoul still needs to respect Beijing’s concerns about the deployment of an advanced U. S. anti-missile system, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his South Korean counterpart.
China has repeatedly expressed opposition to South Korea’s planned deployment later this year of the U. S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system, which Seoul and Washington say is needed to defend against North Korea.
China worries the system’s powerful radar can penetrate its territory and it has objected to the deployment.
Meeting on Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Wang repeated to South Korea’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se China’s opposition to THAAD, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
Wang “stressed that one country’s security should not be founded on the basis of harming another country’s security”, the ministry paraphrased him as saying.
“China understands South Korea’s need to protect its own security, and at the same time South Korea should respect China’s reasonable position,” Wang added.
Yun Fu Ying, chairwoman of the foreign affairs committee in the Chinese National People’s Congress, told a panel discussion at the Munich conference that China could not understand Washington’s decision to deploy the system to South Korea.
