China’s approach to the Korean peninsula embodies that of both a decisive power, and an impotent observer.
China’s approach to the Korean peninsula embodies that of both a decisive power, and an impotent observer.
Official rhetoric has been relatively conservative. State media publications as well as public statements by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and others never verge into overtly aggressive statements toward North Korea. Potential conflict stemming from a North Korean crisis is dealt with in generally vague ways.
Chinese editorials celebrating the country’s centrality to the latest round of sanctions on North Korea remind domestic readers that China is carrying forward its responsibilities as ‘a great power’ .
This kind of work also leads to editorials about China’s ‘bottom line’ on the Korean peninsula, which includes, if not a Kim-led North Korea, a North Korea that remains sovereign and does not become ‘opposed to China’ .
The Chinese media has drifted away from the kind of rhetorical savaging that the North Koreans practice on ‘the American imperialist wolves’ . But the rhetoric of national humiliation still has its purposes. Editorial discussions of US naval patrols in the South China Sea are given bombastic titles like ‘This is not 1937, and the South China Sea is not the Marco Polo Bridge’ , explicitly likening the United States to the Japanese aggressors of yore. Not incidentally, Mao and Zhou Enlai did precisely the same thing in the early 1950s, posing US moves on the Korean peninsula as a reprise of Japan’s 1894 action to humiliate China and strip Taiwan from the mainland’s inexorable orbit.
China’s recollections of the war can become, to abuse a Maoist term, protracted.
That is, Chinese war memory credibly has the ability to stretch into the stationing of troops in North Korea until 1958, a period that was accompanied by the reconstruction of that country’s infrastructure via Chinese labour. A great deal of data on China’s reconstruction of North Korean rail and road networks in that period is now available, a neat convergence of socialist internationalist nostalgia with the government’s current zeal for cross-border transportation chains.
As a result of the military presence in North Korea through most of the 1950s, China’s intelligence on North Korea’s tunnel network is second to none.
