Confirming what I have said that at the end China need for buffer state triump everything else. Heck it has been China policy since time immemorial The Tang and Sui prevent Koguryeo from dominating north east Asia, Then the Yuan conquer Korea. The Ming drive the marauding Hideyoshi pirate out of Korea. The Qing 1895 Korea war though China lost this time. down to modern time of Chairman Mao
A reckless North Korea remains China’s useful ally
Only a genuine — and terrifying — crisis will change allegiance to the client state
by: James Kynge
The anthem of the Chinese “volunteer” army that fought against the US in the Korean war is rarely heard these days, aside from in a few patriotic films. But it still describes the basic strategic orientation of China in North Asia 63 years after the war ended without a peace treaty: “The good sons and daughters of China, hearts united as one; Resist the US, protect Korea, smash the American wild wolves.”
The wolf metaphors have been dropped, but Beijing is still “resisting the US, protecting (North) Korea” as if the strategy was trapped in amber.
Economically, things have changed utterly. The deep and symbiotic commercial relationship that has grown between the US and China drove more than half a trillion dollars in bilateral trade last year. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students — including offspring of the ruling Communist elite — studied at US colleges. Chinese companies spent $51bn acquiring US counterparts, a three-fold jump on the previous year.
So why, then, has China stuck by Pyongyang, even as the impoverished state terrorises its neighbours by developing a nuclear arsenal that is probably only a few years away from being able to strike US territory? How is Beijing served by prioritising loyalty to an isolated, volatile dictatorship over ties with the world’s superpower?
Such questions have acquired added urgency since Donald Trump warned this month that “if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will”. This signal was backed up by orders for an aircraft carrier group to be deployed in waters near the Korean peninsula. This week Lieutenant General HR McMaster, the US national security adviser, threatened “other actions” if Pyongyang conducts further nuclear tests.
Such US brinkmanship is aimed at coercing Pyongyang to drop its nuclear weapons programme. But it throws China into a highly conflicted position; Beijing’s alliance with North Korea derives from a founding narrative that asserts that China has struggled against the west to make its way in the world. This creates common cause with the hermit kingdom. Even though a nuclear-armed North Korea led by the mercurial, 33-year-old Kim Jong Un is deeply unpalatable to Beijing, it has been seen as preferable to a regime collapse and the entire Korean peninsula falling under a US security umbrella.
“North Korea is a public-relations nightmare for China every time it does something bad,” says Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But Beijing is wedded to the strategic stability that a junior communist client state on its border provides in a region filled with US military allies.” He argues that Mr Trump is trying to force a change: “It takes a crisis to pry this loose.”
But when Lt Gen McMaster insisted this week that Washington was “going to have to rely on Chinese leadership” to apply economic pressure on Pyongyang, he asked for something that Beijing has obdurately refused to furnish in any real sense.
There is no doubt that China has the ability to bring North Korea’s economy to its knees. It can cut trade links and oil supplies, shut down the internet, banking services and tourism. “These things would devastate the North Korean economy,” says Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna College. “But the reality is that Beijing is far from this point.”
The uncomfortable truth for the US is that Beijing remains inclined to tolerate its exasperating client state for as long as Washington looms as China’s chief strategic competitor. This orientation is so entrenched that anything less than a genuine — and potentially terrifying — crisis may fail to shift it.
As US-China rivalries escalate in the South China Sea and several other theatres, the idea that Beijing may jettison a longstanding ally to please its biggest rival may prove to be wishful thinking.
It is possible that China may apply judicious pressure on Pyongyang to de-escalate tension, but according to analysts, these would fall well short of the merciless intimidation required to force Mr Kim to scrap his nuclear ambitions — which bestow legitimacy upon his bellicose regime.
For Beijing, the priority remains keeping North Korea viable enough to forestall the feared spectre of US troops pressed up against the Yalu river border between China and North Korea.
“There are 35,000 American GIs just over North Korea’s southern border,” says Paul French, author of North Korea: State of Paranoia. “I think what is lost in all the chatter about Kim’s weirdness and murderous tendencies is that North Korea is still primarily for China a buffer state.”
The battle of Shangangling
