Chinese Finance Minister Xiao Jie was absent from a trilateral meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts on Friday due to “important policy issues” in his country, Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso said.
“I heard he could not attend the meeting because he had to deal with important policy issues,” Aso told reporters after the trilateral meeting, which was held on the sidelines of Asian Development Bank’s annual gathering in Yokohama, eastern Japan.
The Chinese delegation was represented by its deputy finance minister and a senior official from the Chinese central bank at the trilateral summit where finance officials from the three countries met and issued a resolve to resist protectionism, according to a Japanese Ministry of Finance official.
