Seoul is paying "more careful attention" to China, a senior government official said after President Lee Myung-bak last week named his former chief of staff Yu Woo-ik as Seoul's new ambassador to Beijing.

It was an implicit admission that the Lee administration has been somewhat neglectful of China by giving top priority to relations with the U.S. But Beijing's political and economic influence is growing rapidly, and China and Japan seem closer than any other time.

Lee was impressed by China's rapid economic recovery during his visit there for a Korea-China-Japan summit in early October this year. He reportedly told officials to make more efforts to improve ties with China given that the market will grow even bigger.

Early this month Lee met Wang Yang, a visiting party secretary from China's Guangdong Province. It was unprecedented for the president to meet one of the leaders of China's 22 provinces, but Lee accepted suggestions from diplomatic staff that he should meet Yang. They told Lee that Guangdong Province is responsible for a hefty share of China's economic might and its trade volume with Korea amounted to US$32.1 billion last year. As the youngest member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Wang is seen as a promising next-generation leader.

The government official said China has complained that visiting Chinese officials do not have as many chances as their American counterparts to meet Lee.

The Foreign Ministry has mooted setting up a China bureau separate from the Northeast Asian Affairs Bureau, which deals with China and Japan, after criticism that the single China division at the ministry is not fully capable of handling the heavy workload. Bilateral trade amounts to $168.3 billion and the total number of visitors both ways reaches 6 million per year.

The ministry has put the idea aside for the time being since the administration's overall policy is to streamline government organizations and because of possible repercussions in Japan. But a ministry official said there already is widespread consensus in the ministry that it is necessary to give more weight to China.