"South Korea has been trapped in the false choice of 'security with the U.S., economy with China'—and President Lee Jae Myung has decided to break out of it," said Yu Ji-won, director of the Institute for Korea-China Relations at Wonkwang University, in an interview with South on January 6. "He understands that security and economic interests are not separate spheres but a single strategic whole."

It is believed by an Australian scholar that as China continues to assert itself as an unexpected champion of open trade, its domestic economic trajectory offers concrete evidence of its capacity to shape the global economic order.