With South Korea’s presidential election around a month away, top candidates sparred in their first official television debate late Thursday night, with foreign, defense and North Korea policy taking up almost a quarter of the two-hour event.

The candidates expressed diverging views on how to build relations with China over the next five years, whether South Korea needs more U.S. missile defense batteries, how to deter North Korean missile threats and how much Seoul should push Washington on sensitive issues like a nuclear weapons sharing deal.

The debate featured frontrunners Yoon Suk-yeol of