BEIJING, 15 October 2006 — Beijing’s reaction to North Korea’s nuclear testing announcement was unusually swift and forceful. Within hours on Monday, the normally slow-to-react Chinese government characterized Pyongyang’s action as “hanran,” meaning brazen, a term generally reserved for its worst enemies.
By midweek, however, China was sounding more like its old self: Calling for dialogue, eschewing confrontation and warning against comprehensive economic sanctions, even as it redoubled efforts to lurch its longtime ally back to the negotiating table.
As North Korea’s top supplier of energy and food, Beijing is viewed as the key to a tough international response at the United Nations to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s provocation. And Washington, for its part, argues that China must be a “responsible stakeholder” if it wants a leading role in international society.
But with its go-slow stance, Beijing has been exposed to foreign criticism that it is squandering a golden opportunity to display global leadership.
The problem, analysts say, is that China draws much different conclusions than Washington, even in the middle of a nuclear crisis, because it has a very different idea of what’s important and what it needs to survive and prosper. While the United States and Europe view a nuclear North Korea as a fundamental threat to the global order, China sees it less as a problem in its own right than as a catalyst for secondary headaches including the possible destabilization of the Korean Peninsula and militarization of Japan. “America wants to see North Korea go away, representing the final victory of the Cold War,” said Alexandre Mansourov, a security expert with the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “China’s interests, however, lie in keeping North Korea in place. China’s not doing this because it loves Kim Jong Il, but because it wants the buffer to remain.”
Furthermore, Beijing appears to be less worried about a nuclear-armed North Korea.
“There’s a big perception gap,” said Jin Linbo, Asia-Pacific director at Beijing’s China Institute of International Studies. “China has a different assessment of the danger.”
Beijing already lives in a tough neighborhood where nuclear neighbors are abundant. It nearly went to war with a nuclear Russia in the 1960s and more recently watched Pakistan and rival India join the club. China is not all that impressed by Pyongyang’s nuclear technology, analysts add, nor does it see itself as an intended target.
China’s current stage bears similarities to the United States from the Civil War to World War I, says Jin Canrong, vice dean of foreign relations at Beijing’s Renmin University. It is industrializing rapidly, weathering a huge population shift from rural to urban areas and is grappling with enormous social problems related to rising expectations and a widening wealth gap.
In the same way America was primarily isolationist as it focused on internal development, China’s leadership seeks enough time and international stability to lift its people out of poverty, ease societal stresses and keep enough money flowing to ensure the continued monopoly position of the Communist Party.
A bigger danger than North Korean nukes from China’s perspective is of Washington destablizing the region. Beijing apparently believes it needs North Korea as a buffer against the 30,000 or so US troops stationed in South Korea to guard against an attack by Kim. Beijing, along with Russia, fears sanctions could lead to regime change in Pyongyang and growing US influence in their backyard. Sanctions presaged the US-led NATO removal of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and the 2003 Iraq invasion that unseated Saddam Hussein.
Moreover, if Kim fell, the risk of refugees flooding across the border into China is a frightening economic and social prospect. Also weighing on China’s mind is a fear that precipitate action could disrupt its courtship of South Korea, analysts say. If the Pyongyang regime collapses in the near future in the wake of sanctions or direct military action, the United States would retain significant influence over a Seoul-dominated Korean Peninsula. Keeping Kim in place, on the other hand, would eventually see both Koreas in China’s camp.
“South Korea is the big prize in all of this,” said Ralph Cossa, executive director of Honolulu-based Pacific Forum CSIS.
Since relations were normalized in 1992, Beijing has watched approvingly as anti-American sentiment has grown in South Korea, US troop levels have declined, China supplanted the United States as Seoul’s largest trading partner and trendy young Koreans have dropped their English-language classes in droves to study Mandarin. A sign of China’s growing confidence is its support for South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon as the next UN secretary-general, a nominee it would have condemned as a US puppet a decade ago.
None of which is to say that North Korea doesn’t infuriate Beijing. Despite receiving much of its food and an estimated 70 percent of its energy from China, the North is often ungrateful and defiant knowing China’s interests would be hurt by its collapse. The way Pyongyang sees it, analysts add, Beijing merely writes the checks while it is doing the heavy lifting in the front-line battle against Western imperialists.
