China\u2019s approach to the Korean peninsula embodies that of both a decisive power, and an impotent observer.<\/b>
\nChina\u2019s 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\u2019s centrality to the latest round of sanctions on North Korea remind domestic readers that China is carrying forward its responsibilities as \u2018a great power\u2019 .
This kind of work also leads to editorials about China\u2019s \u2018bottom line\u2019 on the Korean peninsula, which includes, if not a Kim-led North Korea, a North Korea that remains sovereign and does not become \u2018opposed to China\u2019 .
The Chinese media has drifted away from the kind of rhetorical savaging that the North Koreans practice on \u2018the American imperialist wolves\u2019 . 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 \u2018This is not 1937, and the South China Sea is not the Marco Polo Bridge\u2019 , 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\u2019s 1894 action to humiliate China and strip Taiwan from the mainland\u2019s inexorable orbit.
China\u2019s 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\u2019s infrastructure via Chinese labour. A great deal of data on China\u2019s reconstruction of North Korean rail and road networks in that period is now available, a neat convergence of socialist internationalist nostalgia with the government\u2019s current zeal for cross-border transportation chains.
As a result of the military presence in North Korea through most of the 1950s, China\u2019s intelligence on North Korea\u2019s tunnel network is second to none. Many of the underground chasms that now hold the Korean People\u2019s Army artillery and untold nuclear hardware were either deepened or dug by the Chinese in the first place.
China holds all sorts of keys, including economic ones. It is not simply an overwhelming trade balance, but knowledge of the North Korean economy.
As Andray Abrahamian said in a Tokyo seminar on 5 July 2017:
\u2018China also has, by far, the best information on what is going on in the North Korean economy, better, I suspect, than the North Koreans have themselves. They have thousands of people running businesses \u2014 the huaqiao, or ethnic Chinese \u2014 who go back and forth all the time. They have consulates or offices in several cities in a way that no other country has, and they have a huge embassy in Pyongyang. So they really, really know what\u2019s going on. I think that they will be able to smell a crisis far earlier than anyone else and will be able to take steps to make sure it doesn\u2019 t turn into a full-blown collapse\u2019 .
But China\u2019s assumed predominant and potential power in the event of a North Korea crisis is only ever raised obliquely, such as in the case of People\u2019s Liberation Army military drills in Jilin province like those in March 2017, or in fulsome public recollections of the \u2018War to Resist America and Aid Korea\u2019 .
China\u2019s Foreign Ministry today calls for \u2018double suspension\u2019 , namely, a suspension of North Korean nuclear missile and nuclear tests paired with a US and South Korean suspension of annual joint military exercises. As the US State Department pointed out, this Chinese suggestion rests upon the fallacy of moral equivalency \u2014 namely, while the US\u2013South Korea exercises are legal and transparent, the North Korean tests are internationally illegal.
So why go along with it, much less the Chinese suggestion that the United States starts a parallel process of peace talks for a treaty with North Korea, outside of the diseased and disused but still present frame of the Six-Party Talks?
One can sympathise with China\u2019s need to simply do something, particularly the desire for that \u2018something\u2019 to be a series of actions that do not ask anything whatsoever of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) . In that sense, it is simply a retort to the US insistence to turn the screws ever tighter on North Korea. Moreover, calling for \u2018dual-suspension\u2019 or denouncing the \u2018China responsibility theory\u2019 distances the need to dig deeper into the unpleasant marrow of what the United States actually appears to want. This is a full economic blockade on North Korea and, depending on the day and the politician, either the trial of its leaders for crimes against humanity or for China to open its doors to a new wave of wealthy and complicit North Korean elites in exile, including the Kim family.
The CCP\u2019s purge of Sun Zhengcai, replete with warnings to officials in Jilin \u2014 the northeastern border province that he managed during the fattest years of Chinese sunshine toward North Korea \u2014 would appear to indicate that the CCP will remain in a holding pattern in its foreign policy toward North Korea for the time being. In the meantime, the presses must thunder anew each day, and China must be seen by its own citizens to be a proactive power whose shortcomings on the North Korea issue can be explained away by pointing fingers outward \u2014 less often at the familiar crevasses and tunnels of Pyongyang, but at the loose lips and swivelling thumbs of one Donald Trump.
Adam Cathcart is a Lecturer in Chinese history at Leeds University.<\/p>\n