No major breakthroughs are expected at the meeting, which is being held in Seoul. But analysts say the very fact that the annual summit between the three countries is resuming is a positive sign for cooperation among the Northeast Asian nations. On the eve of the meeting, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida held a series of bilateral meetings that touched on thorny issues including North Korea, Taiwan and the South China Sea. After meeting with Li, Kishida said he had expressed concerns about the situations in the South China Sea, Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region in northwest China. Kishida also said Japan was closely monitoring developments involving the self-ruled island of Taiwan. Kishida was referring to China’s military assertiveness in the South China Sea, its crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong and its alleged human rights abuses against Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Last week, China also launched a major military exercise around Taiwan to express its anger over the inauguration of the island’s new leader, who refuses to accept that the territory is part of China. When Yoon met separately with Li on Sunday, he raised concerns about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and its deepening military ties with Russia, and called on China, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, to help promote peace on the Korean Peninsula, according to the South Korean presidential office. South Korea, Japan and the United States have long urged China — North Korea’s main ally and economic benefactor — to use its influence to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions. But China has been accused of avoiding fully implementing U.N. sanctions on the North Korean regime and of providing clandestine shipments of aid to its impoverished neighbor. In a development that could further raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese coast guard said Monday that North Korea had notified it of a plan to launch a satellite early next week, in what would likely be the country’s second attempt to put a military spy satellite into orbit. North Korea says it needs spy satellites to monitor South Korea and the United States and to improve the accuracy of its missiles. The sensitive issues involving China are not on the official agenda for Tuesday’s meeting. Officials in South Korea, which is hosting the meeting, have said a joint statement after the three-way talks will cover the leaders’ discussions on cooperation in areas such as people-to-people exchanges, climate change, trade, health issues, technology and disaster response. Together, the three Asian nations account for about 25% of the world’s gross domestic product. But their relations have been strained by issues related to Japan’s wartime aggression, China’s ambitions to be the dominant power in the region and U.S. efforts to strengthen its Asian alliances. South Korea and Japan are both key U.S. allies in the region. Their moves to strengthen their trilateral security partnership with the United States have drawn rebukes from China. The China-South Korea-Japan trilateral meeting was supposed to be held annually after the first one in 2008. But the sessions have been suspended since the last one in December 2019 in Chengdu, China, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and worsening ties among the three countries. Read Also: China pede a Seul e Tóquio que rejeitem "protecionismo" económico (Portuguese version)