Beijing's limited clout with
Pyongyang By Antoaneta
Bezlova
BEIJING - Just days after Washington cast
doubt over Beijing's influence over the Stalinist regime
of North Korea, China's leaders have showcased their
unremitting efforts to steer the belligerent North into
adopting more pragmatic economic polices and giving up
its nuclear ambitions.
In three days of
secretive meetings in Beijing, the entire standing
committee of the powerful Politburo of the Communist
Party of China (CPC) met with North Korea's reclusive
leader, Kim Jong-il. It is believe they urged him to
cooperate and agree to give up his nuclear weapons
program - in exchange for energy and material
compensation from the West - and to reform and modernize
his economy so that millions will not suffer hunger and
starvation.
The actual results of the visit are
not known, despite speeches on both sides extolling
communist and socialist brotherhood and camaraderie.
What is known - and had been previously known - was that
North Korea agreed to join another round of six-party
talks sometime before July. These involve both Koreas,
China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Kim's April 19-22 visit is his first to China
since the team of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen
Jiabao took over in 2003 from the older generation of
Chinese leaders, led by Jiang Zemin. He traveled by
train, as he always does, and as did his father, Kim
Jong-il.
The series of China meetings was aimed
at demonstrating China's enduring sway over its
troubling, troublesome and poor communist neighbor,
after United States Vice President Dick Cheney visited
Beijing earlier this month. Cheney warned Chinese
leaders that the time for negotiations to rid North
Korea of nuclear weapons was running out. Last October
Pyongyang admitted to having a secret uranium enrichment
program.
Cheney presented Beijing with what he
called new evidence that North Korea possessed a nuclear
bomb and said Asia was on the brink of a nuclear arms
race.
China has played host to two rounds of
six-party talks aimed at ending the crisis. A third
round is planned before July, but results from the talks
so far have been inconclusive.
Shortly after
Kim's armored train left Beijing on Wednesday, state
media announced that his meetings with Chinese leaders
produced a consensus on how to end the nuclear
stalemate.
Bla-bla-bla: Consensus, positive
results "Leaders of the two parties and two
countries have engaged in in-depth discussion about the
bilateral, international and regional state of affairs,
as well as the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula,"
said Liu Hongcai, deputy director of the communist
party's international department. "They have reached
broad-based consensus and gained positive results."
During a meeting with Chinese President Hu
Jintao, Kim said the North "sticks to the final
nuclear-weapon-free goal and its basic position on
seeking a peaceful solution through dialogue has not
changed," the state-run Inhuman news agency reported. It
said the two leaders "agreed to continue ... jointly
pushing forward the six-party talks process".
Breaking a mandatory news blackout during Kim's
unannounced visit to Beijing, on Wednesday night,
Chinese Central Television broadcast a 12 minute-footage
of Kim smiling and waving at and hugging Chinese
leaders. In an obvious attempt to emphasize the
importance central government leaders attached to the
visit, the official Xinhua news agency ran lengthy
reports on Kim's meetings and eulogized the history of
friendship and communist camaraderie shared by the two
neighboring countries.
Chinese leaders praised
the North's "self-reliance and arduous work" in recent
years and pledged to help Pyongyang with its economic
development.
During his visit, Kim was shown
Zhongguancun Technology Park in northwestern Beijing,
known as China's Silicon Valley. On his way home, Kim
was expected to tour the major industrial centers of
Shenyang, or Dalian, in China's northeast in order to
study government efforts to reinvigorate heavy
industries with foreign investment.
China
keeps trying to push market reforms Study trips
have become routine during Kim's rare visits to China.
For some 25 years since China's reform and opening up,
Beijing has tried to guide Pyongyang into adopting
market reforms and boosting the North's bankrupt
economy.
While the North Korean leader dutifully
goes through the motions of hailing China's showcase
foreign-invested car factories, stock markets, research
laboratories and information technology achievements,
little in the North has changed to resemble China.
North Korea lavishly celebrated what would have
been the 92th birthday anniversary of its late leader,
Kim Il-sung. Almost 10 years after his death, he remains
the country's "Eternal President". After mass
exhibitions of dancing and singing, speakers hailed him
as the "paragon of the world revolutionaries and a
veteran statesman".
The regime allowed more than
two million Koreans to starve to death before taking
small and unconvincing steps in the direction of
Chinese-style rural economic reforms.
Kim
Jong-il continues to stick rigidly to his "army-first"
policy, which means pouring all resources into the
military in preparation for a possible invasion of
capitalist South Korea and mounting defiance of
Washington.
To prevent the North's collapse,
Beijing is thought to be have been providing up to a
billion dollars worth of food, oil and other basic
necessities in recent years.
N Korea refugees
flood into to China Without China's efforts to
repel a flood of refugees, officials here fear that the
North might follow in the footsteps of East Germany. The
whole embassy area of Beijing is ringed by barbed wire
to prevent North Korean refugees from seeking asylum.
Earlier this month, Chinese border guards shot
dead one North Korean refugee when he and 23 others
tried to cross through China into Mongolia, according to
the South Korean-based Christian mission Durihana. Many
of those forcibly repatriated are executed, or die in
North Korean camps, activists say.
Beijing's
leverage over Pyongyang has remained open to question
ever since the death of Kim's father. The older
generation of Chinese leaders had sentimental ties to
the late Kim Il-sung, who for nearly 20 years was a
loyal member of the Chinese Communist Party and spoke
Chinese. This kinship however, never extended to Kim's
son and heir, Kim Jong-il.
Throughout the 1980s,
Kim Jong-il denounced late Chinese leader Deng
Xiaoping's economic reforms, and instead, fostered a
military alliance with the dying Soviet Union, which was
willing to support the North's nuclear ambitions.
Relations soured further when Beijing recognized South
Korea in 1992 and were only revived when North Korea
turned to Beijing, desperate for economic aid in 1989.
Kim believes the only thing that guarantees his
survival is the North's nuclear arsenal. But now China
is pressing him to give that up as well, nervous that
the US might otherwise take unilateral action to disarm
him.
