South Korea and China will hold a meeting of senior officials next week over a dispute on their partially overlapping exclusive economic zones in the Yellow Sea, the foreign ministry said Friday.

The director general-level meeting will begin in Beijing on Tuesday for a two-day run, according to the ministry. Park Chull-joo, chief of the ministry's international law affairs bureau, will represent South Korea, while Wang Xiaodu, Chinese ambassador for Yellow Sea affairs, will lead the Chinese side.

(Yonhap)
The two sides had held two rounds of director-general level negotiations over the EEZ last year following a vice-minister level meeting over the maritime demarcation in 2015. But the negotiations yielded little progress, with both sides refusing to budge from their positions.

Seoul has demanded that the EEZ be demarcated by drawing a median line. However, Beijing has argued that the coasts and the population along them must be taken into account to conduct a proportional EEZ demarcation.

The EEZ is a sea zone over which a country has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources. It stretches out to 200 nautical miles from the coastline. (Yonhap)