BEIJING, 22 April 2004 — When Chinese television broke media silence on the stealthy visit of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Il, it highlighted comradely ties to show Kim and China’s leaders embracing in bear hugs and smiling broadly.
A ream of Xinhua news agency reports that flowed shortly after Kim boarded his private luxury train back to Pyongyang trumpeted 55 years of “good-neighborly” relations.
No country has closer ties with staunchly Communist North Korea than China. That much is true.
But these days that’s not saying much.
In reality, North Korea and China are Communist brothers in little more than name and analysts say relations have been shaken by the international crisis surrounding Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programs.
“Each harbors contempt for the other,” said Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korea expert at Tufts University in the United States. “The North Korean nuclear threat is a major headache for the Chinese.”
China worries that a nuclear North could set off a regional arms race and has become increasingly impatient as the crisis has dragged on, with no end in sight despite Beijing’s unusually active efforts to find a diplomatic resolution.
The standoff is just the latest in a string of bumps that have strained the relationship that appeared ironclad when China came to North Korea’s rescue in the 1950-53 Korean War.
Indeed, ideological differences have dogged ties between the Communist parties since the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. Just after that, Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung, purged many of his pro-China rivals.
During China’s destructive Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, North Korea kept its distance and looked on with superiority.
And Pyongyang blasted Beijing as revisionist after China embarked on economic reforms from the late 1970s.
“Relations are certainly at a low ebb,” said Marc Lanteigne, professor of political science at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “Especially in comparison with the Maoist and Dengist eras when both states continuously affirmed their strong relationship with each other.”
As sour as ties may have turned, when Beijing strategists crunch the data they conclude that North Korea’s existence, and close China relations with Pyongyang, are essential at least for now, analysts say.
A “buffer” school of thought, which sees the North as a cushion between China and US troops in South Korea, remains dominant in Chinese policy-making circles, You Ji, a scholar at the University of New South Wales, said in a recent paper. “Pyongyang’s ill-intentions and unpredictable adventurism notwithstanding, North Korea’s very existence remains of great strategic value to a China whose worst security nightmare is that of another Korean war,” he said.
Although the gulf between their strategic interests is widening as China’s fate becomes increasingly linked to the economic and political stability of Asia and the world, an abrupt collapse of impoverished North Korea is not in China’s interests.
