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China 'fails' test over North Korea

2005-06-30Asia Times

BEIJING - In 1978, Chinese troops went into Vietnam to "teach Hanoi a lesson", completing a full circle of bilateral relations that went from almost complete integration to enmity. China was putting pressure on Vietnam, which itself had invaded Cambodia and forcibly changed the regime there.

China's move, taken in agreement with and with the full knowledge of the Americans, despite failure in the field - Vietnam resisted valiantly and taught China a lesson - helped to bolster Beijing-Washington relations. Yet a quarter of a century later, the memory of that invasion still haunts relations between China and Vietnam.

So while Vietnam and the US are now signing deals on military and intelligence cooperation, possibly aimed in part at China, Beijing is left in the cold, and its ties with Washington are not nearly as idyllic as they were 27 years ago.

During his recent trip to the US, Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai signed various agreements for bilateral cooperation in education, agriculture, communications, healthcare, security and defense, and agreed that Vietnam send military officers to the US for training.

In this environment, China's very troubled ties with Vietnam cast a shadow over its relations with another neighbor - North Korea.

The US and Japan are pressuring China to squeeze Pyongyang over its nuclear program and the stalled six-party talks on that issue. The US especially wants China to force Pyongyang to abandon its arms program, believing that Beijing is the only country with sufficient leverage over North Korea as China supplies it with most of its food and energy needs.

One can see a clear pressure point there: if you don't give up nuclear weapons, then we are going to strangle your economy. The US must clearly wonder why China is not willing to exercise this pressure, if it really believes that a nuclear North Korea is contrary to its interests in the region.

All sorts of suspicions can ensue: that China is playing a proxy soft war with the US by touting a nuclear North Korea; Beijing having a card to play in return for America going easy in handling the Taiwan issue; using North Korea as a prod to Japan, with whom Beijing's relations are at a low.

So it would appear that China feels it has everything to lose and nothing to gain in giving up a nuclear North Korea to the US, which is anyway growing suspicious of China.

In any case, these are all short-term tactical calculations that can be added to the complex political equation about North Korea. But China considers big political issues from a long-term, historical perspective, and the long-term advantages of a good partnership with the US far outweigh all these short-term benefits.

On the other hand, America is far away and it only came to Asia in the past 150 years - in another 50 or 100 years it could be gone, while Korea will forever be China's neighbor. Even in the sort term, one wonders whether China can afford to have, after Vietnam, another ex-ally turned into an enemy.

Relations between China and North Korea used to be "closer than lips and teeth", closer than those between China and Vietnam. And they are much more complex. China had some 400,000 soldiers killed in the Korean War in the 1950s. Even now, North Korea is unwilling to admit how large China's contribution to the war was. Many contemporary Chinese historians have begun to doubt the wisdom of going to war in Korea in 1950, instead of trying to get Taiwan back.

Certainly, North Korea would not have survived without Chinese intervention, whereas Vietnam won the war with America without China. In fact, America warmed up to China in part to gain some advantage in Vietnam during the war. This changed the geopolitics of the time, but did not alter the final result of the war.

Yet if America had managed to reach out to China in a similar way in 1950, Kim Il-sung would have most likely become just a footnote in history. For the following half century, North Korean leaders cleverly jockeyed between Moscow and Beijing, favored by having common borders with both countries. Vietnam could never have done the same, as it does not share a border with Russia.

Pyongyang's jockeying came to a sudden halt with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and it was left to rely only on China. But with this came more suspicion and fear for China, as the Soviet collapse was followed by Kim Il-sung's death in 1994, and the crash of the North Korean economy.

A decade later, North Korea's economic woes are not over. Beijing wants Pyongyang to embrace the Chinese style of economic reforms, but Pyongyang is prudent, as it fears that such reforms would capsize its political system.

North Korea had survived for half a century thanks to generous donations from Beijing and Moscow, both vying for friendship. Then no one was vying for anything from North Korea, and clever Kim Jong-il, who succeeded his father, devised a new scheme: instead of selling friendship, he would hold the fate of his people, now starving, hostage. At the same time, he would do nothing to decrease military expenditure to help the starving, using it instead to develop missiles, better if capped with atomic warheads.


The goal is the same as with the older Kim: sustain the North Korean economy through donations, not by sustained development. This increased China's leverage over North Korea, as its main donor, but also decreased China's room for maneuver, as Beijing - by giving, or by not giving - could determine North Korea's fate and thus arouse resentment in North Korea.

In other words, as China's relationship with North Korea is deeper and longer than that with Vietnam, the ramifications of the two falling out are are much more serious. As such, China has to think very carefully before it takes any action that might threaten its ties with Pyongyang.

Despite all his blustering and bold threats, Kim Jong-il is not mad enough to go to war with any of his neighbors. Indeed, in the heat of the Iraqi war, with the US preoccupied, he could have caused trouble, but he stayed quiet. By doing so he proved wiser and wilier than Taiwan, which at that time pushed the envelope of polemics with Beijing more than once, and ruffled many feathers in Washington.

Cautious approach
Nevertheless, there is justified concern that Kim may have the bomb, or be close to it, both in the US, which lived through the Cold War, and in Japan, which has experienced atomic bombs.

This calls for a cautious approach, looking for long-term solutions. There is a good argument for backing slow economic transformation - the steady spread of cans of cola, growing corruption among North Korean cadres doing business with China - these could lead to more meaningful changes than just twisting Kim's arm now.

But it appears that as far as North Korea is concerned, for the US there is more at stake than a nuclear Pyongyang. With the six-party talks, the US has been gauging China's overall reliability. In other words, the talks were a way to establish and build trust over a very sensitive issue.

However, the US became side-tracked with the "war on terror" and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving China to deal with North Korea. Yet now Washington finds that North Korea is still as dangerous as ever, and still refusing to join the six-party talks.

China might not have approved of the US's rush methods, or could have been put off by its difficulties with Japan, which was talking up the "Korean threat" even as South Korea and China were playing it down. This could have been viewed in Beijing as an attempt by Japan to prevent the US and China from getting too cozy, something that could squeeze Japan in the middle.

When countries come together, they normally have different agendas, but the fact remains that there seems to be no greater trust between the US and China now than there was four years ago, when the Korean talks started. So we can conclude that China possibly did not see the opportunity to improve bilateral trust, or failed to convince the US in this respect.

There is growing uneasiness in the US about China, fed by the many voices raised against China National Offshore Oil Company's US$18.5 billion bid for the US oil company Unocal, and new intelligence reports on enhanced Chinese military (especially intercontinental missile) capabilities. Both developments will put pressure on the US to take a tougher stand against China.

There could be another victim, and a bigger one, from this - the six-party talks. (2005-06-30 Asia Times)

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