Beijing has made little secret of its goal to replace the United States as the major power in Asia, but North Korea presents a nettlesome challenge.
BEIJING — The two men stood together on the reviewing stand in the North Korean capital: a top official in China ’s Communist leadership wearing a tailored business suit and a young dictator in a blue jacket buttoned to his chin.
Liu Yunshan, the visiting Chinese dignitary, and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, tried to put on a show of friendship, chatting amiably as the cameras rolled, but just as often they stood silent, staring ahead as a military parade passed before them.
Nearly two years have elapsed since that encounter, the last high-level visit between China and North Korea. The stretch of time is a sign of the distance between two nations with a torturous history: one a rising power seeking regional dominance, the other an unpredictable neighbor with its own ambitions.
China has made little secret of its long-term goal to replace the United States as the major power in Asia and assume what it considers its rightful position at the center of the fastest-growing, most dynamic region in the world.
But North Korea, which defied Beijing by testing a sixth nuclear bomb on Sunday, has emerged as an unexpected and persistent obstacle.
Other major hurdles litter China’s path. The United States, despite signs of retreat in Asia under the Trump administration, remains the dominant military power. And India and Japan, China’s traditional rivals in the region, have made clear that they intend to resist its gravitational pull.
Yet North Korea — an outcast of the international order that Beijing hopes to lead, but also a nuclear state in part because of China’s own policies — presents a particularly nettlesome challenge.
China’s path to dominance requires an American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on the United States for protection. But North Korea threatens to draw the United States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.
At the same time, the strategic location of the North — and its advancing nuclear capabilities — make it dangerous for China to restrain it.
“North Korea may not be the biggest problem to China, but it does add a unique and very serious dimension to China’s task of supplanting America in East Asia, ” said Hugh White, a former strategist for the Australian Defense Department. “That’s because it is the only East Asian power with nuclear weapons .”
Even if the United States steps back from the region, Mr. White added, “North Korea’s capability means China can never be able to dominate the region as much as its leaders today probably hope.”
The Trump administration has bet on China to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, shunning talks with Mr. Kim and gambling that Beijing can be persuaded to use its economic leverage over the North to rein it in.
But in doing so, the White House may be misreading the complexity of China’s relationship with North Korea, one that successive generations of Chinese leaders have struggled to manage.
There is growing resentment against Mr. Kim inside China, both in the general public and the policy establishment. China keeps North Korea running with oil shipments and accounts for almost all its foreign trade. But to many Chinese, the young leader seems ungrateful.
A three-day academic seminar in Shanghai last month brought together some critics, who question North Korea’s value to Beijing as a strategic buffer against South Korea and Japan — and warn that the North could prompt them to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
“The cost is to continue to alienate Japan, enrage the United States and irritate South Korea, ” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University. “If Japan and South Korea feel forced to go for radical options like nuclear weapons, it will badly affect regional diplomacy.”
The spread of nuclear weapons, he added, would thrust China into “a new Cold War” in Asia, perhaps with a beefed-up American military presence. That would frustrate Beijing’s ambitions for regional supremacy while also leaving it vulnerable to being labeled an enabler of nuclear proliferation, tarnishing its international reputation.
“A balance of mutually assured destruction in Northeast Asia will not be a satisfactory situation for anyone, ” said Bilahari Kausikan, a former foreign secretary for Singapore. “But it will not necessarily be unstable, and it may be of some small consolation to Washington, Tokyo and Seoul that the implications for Beijing are somewhat worse.”
President Xi Jinping is said to be aware of such risks and to have privately expressed disdain for Mr. Kim.
But like his predecessors, he has resisted punishing sanctions that might cause North Korea’s collapse and lead to a destabilizing war on its border, a refugee crisis in China’s economically vulnerable northeast, or a unified Korean Peninsula controlled by American forces.
All these possibilities could pose as much a problem for China’s plans for ascendancy in Asia as an arms race in the region. And if North Korea somehow survived, it would remain on China’s border, angry and aggrieved.
From Mr. Xi’s perspective, a hostile neighbor armed with nuclear weapons may be the worst outcome.
