SPEAKING FREELY China and North Korea's pit bull alliance
By Brett Daniel Shehadey
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
China is, however inappropriately, exploiting North Korea as an indirect way to coerce the US. This is a geopolitical, regional, strategy - one of plausible deniability and distraction - as well as frustrating and eroding political will and scattering US military force efforts.
North Korea takes the center stage in the Pacific as the ugliest
nation around, replacing what was becoming China's extremely poor publicity as well as humiliation and loss. When tensions almost ignited into a military conflict between China and Japan (and allies) - all of a sudden North Korea overshadowed the conflict entirely and international Chinese regional backlash shifted to nuclear threats. China's positive political image jumped up a few notches and the international attention shifted to North Korea, where it remains.
Did the DPRK just want attention on its own? Not likely. Any move that Pyongyang makes is influenced - again, influenced, not directly controlled - by Beijing. That said, Beijing controls over seventy% of their economy via exports and could shut the state down any time of their choosing but has never done so.
Three things make the UN Security Council Resolution 2094, adopted on March 7, 2013 completely irrelevant:
A real commitment from China to punish the Kim Jong-Un's regime. China never agrees to the strongest measures and continues to uphold the state's stability.
Many Chinese firms bypassed previous sanctions and continue supply them with increase; which is in-line with Beijing's tacit consent.
Beijing is not ready to depart with North Korea; especially, at a time of geopolitical containment and strangulation by the US and allies.
Many have insisted that the Chinese give it their best shot or that they fear refugees flooding into their country more than stopping their nuclear ambitions. Wouldn't they fear nuclear weapons and another US-Korean War even more? Now it is reported that 70% of South Koreans feel strongly on considering a nuclear deterrent. And wouldn't there still be a refugee problem in the horrible aftermath of such war?
North Korea has been given the Beijing nod to "act the part" of a menace but not to fully become the villain. Such actions benefit the Chinese image, whose government gets credit for taking very small steps to halt Kim Jong-Un's reckless provocations. Diplomatic efforts allow China to renegotiate the terms of their "cooperation" but such is a mere "dog-and-pony show". China only applies a modicum of pressure on the surface; meanwhile underneath, it collaborates by either planting seeds or making ominous approval.
Even if China never politically supported the North Koreans directly, it would still be in violation of doing too little to stop them. Unfortunately, too much of the world takes Beijing's surface actions as whole-hearted commitments, whether in peaceful nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang or its natural expansion in the Pacific.
Both are lessons to observers that China does not habitually act in full force mobilization or over-commitment, but in small patient steps. Together those steps add up to a larger long-term gain. This is especially the case when the single-party CCP is not certain of an outcome.
No more is this true than gently steering North Korea to greater belligerence. North Korea has recently threatened the US with nuclear war and thrown out the armistice of 1953 that froze the Korean War. Effectively, the move to revoke it is another step to reignite the old war - a war that never ended in peace or treaty - and in which China also saw the incursion of the US military on its doorstep. China has been meaning to remove the US presence for a long time and has taken over the North Korean economy to act as a political leash.
China's military has been surrounded and contained. All allies in the Pacific, including South Korea are with the US. In response to a geopolitical wall, China has lashed out using greater indirect weapons of soft power and military probing. The recent cyber-attacks against the US that were traced by Mandiant Corporation, placed them back to a military unit in China. The damages were not insignificant - affecting some 115 US companies, including defense and intelligence contractors. The Chinese have officially denied this.
Such actions are mostly intended to persuade the US to remove the wall in the Pacific that locks it in. They demonstrate a Chinese ability to disrupt the US defense establishment. Such attacks on small scale might be considered warning, but they may have much farther reaching bilateral political and economic consequences if the US ever decides to retaliate. So far, the Obama Administration favors a reserved cyber-defense initiative.
Distraction is only one part in a series of plans. Disruption in cyber-attacks, espionage and proxies are others. The Chinese are not willing to go to a direct war with the US, and so, the establishment of a dummy target in the face of North Korea is another clever trick. They remain ready and willing to fight back in areas that dissuade US military activity but not yet by their own conventional military means.
Meanwhile, the propaganda wheels spin in China's favor: China is blaming the US and South Korea for North Korea's hostility. This implies that China is a neutral character and does not at all encourage North Korean action. Of course, China also does not want a war, and so it keeps one foot in the Six-Party Talks and another in Pyongyang. It asks that all international parties remain calm. It reasons that if South Korea. Taiwan and Japan are puppets of the US, than its advantage to guide North Korea (who has few, if any, political and financial backers) and exploit them for any regional benefit whatsoever.
Thus, even to this day, the Korean divide remains a game of power balancing between China and the US and although it is no longer a staunch communist-neo-liberal war from the Cold War, it is a war of geopolitics as much as ideological separation - authoritarianism versus neo-liberalism.
Amazingly - on the surface - all share a resolve for peace talks. But underneath the US and the Chinese are venting to gain the upper-edge and see who will back down first. Backing down implies losing a theater advantage.
For the US, the geopolitical advantage is a luxury and a clear moving forward. A loss is tolerable, but not desirable. Any win would include neo-liberal progress of North Korean political-economy, with a non-nuclear, and thus, non-threatening, poor and troubled, North Korean large standing conventional military. The loss is that North Korea continues its nuclear threats and continues to threaten to lash out and weapons development. This is also a win for the Chinese.
Any further loss for China is too close to home to accept. There is a direct threat to its authoritarian regime's ideological survivability; and although far less extreme than the dictator of the DPRK, still not one based on any neo-liberal design or legislated by the West. The mainstay is China's grip on border security and regional power projection.
China needs North Korea, as it has no one else around to tip the balance. It has no matching communist ideologies with its neighbor but does carry particular common objectives. These are differing views to a similar end: the ousting of an American presence and a unified Korea.
China further wants to be seen as the victor, willing to slap the wrist of an ally with the new security resolutions but not prevent it from antagonizing the US or their South Korean proxy. It wants greater power over the entire Korean peninsula - North "and" South.
It is most important that decision makers not get side-tracked by North Korea and its flamboyant leader from the bigger picture. They must consider North Korea as a part of any calculation regarding China or the Pacific island pressures. Their actions, for example, like the nearby US alliances and military drills, threaten not only North Korea but China as well. Certainly, North Korea is not a choice ally for China. It is one they have taken on as a pit bull, not an equal.
Unlike the US-South Korea and US-Japan connection, those economies and states are much more self-sufficient. They might be categorized as loosely interdependent and have similar geopolitical aims.
On the other hand, North Korea has a near complete dependency relationship with China. It does not have anything supporting its massive troops and nuclear weapons development programs other than the bulk of Chinese imports, aid and diplomatic cover.
It is not unlikely that China could eventually lose political influence of North Korea as soon as they no longer require their proxy militancy. But it could also be argued with less difficulty that their relationship has only grown stronger since 2006; especially when all major factors are considered. Either Beijing's action are extremely incompetent or they are strategic and perhaps a bit of both.
It is not unforeseeable that the two will cease an eventual tenuous and rocky relationship, but if that ever happens, North Korea would fall apart in a very short time and the state would truly be isolated from the world. China would face even greater immigration problems, with mass refugees and internal displacement, but would survive. Pyongyang would implode. Next up: The race for territorial control over North Korea would ensue between the US, South Korea and China.
A present or sudden end of North Korea's rulers would provide the US with the greatest advantage and only problems for China. This is why their continued support of using them as a distraction is only a temporal trial in a larger strategy. While everyone looks at the left hand, the right hand, like cybersecurity breaches into the US, is doing another.
As the US allows the dogs of South Korea and Japan to bark a little louder, why should the Chinese not permit their pit bull Pyongyang a howl or two back at the US and friends?
What is the future?
The world can expect more from North Korea. It will continue to do what China will allow - make threats, destroy a few South Korean vessels and murder some more innocent cousins down South. But even the Chinese are getting tired of this old game and do not like the fact that their red government allows such actions.
It is worth noting that China, at any time, can, for a change, solicit the aid of the UN Security Council and the rest of the world, instead of the US having to beg China for diplomatic help. This alternative posturing would allow them an absolute and decisive control, coupled with their own military superiority and economic levers - a last of lasts resort - not likely unless the leash is severed. Do not be fooled: If China decided to make a move, North Korea would vanish from the face of the Earth.
Obviously, the two "partners" will stay the course against the American invaders for as long as China can do so with positive praise from the West; or at least until North Korea does something where even China is fully outraged and shamed.
Brett Daniel Shehadey is a writer, commentator and holds an MA in Strategic Intelligence from AMU and a BS in Political Science from UCLA.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
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