China, Japan and South Korea started talks on a free-trade agreement vital to an Asia-wide deal in a move to forge closer economic ties even as they spar over disputed islands.

The countries, representing three of Asia’s four biggest economies, will hold the first round of talks early next year, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. Those negotiations are key to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a 16-nation accord also announced yesterday that Southeast Asian countries called “the world’s biggest regional free trade deal.”

“The missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle as far as Asia is concerned is the agreement among the three Northeast Asian countries,” said John Ravenhill, a professor at Canberra-based Australian National University. “The negotiations that were supposed to have started between those three countries have been put on hold because of the disputes over the South China Sea and other islands.”

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