If you deplore the current bad blood between China, Japan and South Korea, the good news is that all this week vice-ministers from those three nations are sitting around a table in Beijing.

Ostensibly, they have serious business: the fifth round of negotiations towards a trilateral free trade agreement. Comprising three of Asia's four biggest economies, this trio accounts for 20% of global GDP and 17.5% of world trade. China being the top trade partner of both of the other two, an FTA makes sense. For three such geographically close neighbors with deep cultural and historical ties – the latter sometimes fraught, to be sure – a North East Asian FTA is as logical as its North American trilateral equivalent NAFTA, now 20 years old.

The bad news: This isn't for real. It's a charade. They're just going through the motions.

Cue indignant denials. But for proof that my verdict isn't cynical, check how Japan's foreign ministry reported earlier rounds. The third: "Various areas such as Trade in Goods, Trade in Services, Investment, Competition Policies, Intellectual Property …were discussed." And the fourth? "… Trade in Goods, Trade in Services, Investment, Competition Policies …were discussed." So what's on the agenda this time? "Various areas such as Trade in Goods, Trade in Services, Investment, Competition Policies, Intellectual Property … will be discussed."

You get the picture. Such bland, identikit flannel screams that this FTA is going nowhere. Yet hopes were high when it was launched, barely two years ago. Then, NEA trilateralism seemed the coming thing. Having met since 1999 in the wider forum of ASEAN+3, in 2008 the three countries' leaders began holding annual summits. The fifth of those, in Beijing in May 2012, saw the FTA launched: the obvious next thing, as the trio had just signed an investment treaty.