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China 'fails' test over North
Korea
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - In 1978, Chinese troops went
into Vietnam to "teach Hanoi a lesson", completing
a full circle of bilateral relations that went
from almost complete integration to enmity. China
was putting pressure on Vietnam, which itself had
invaded Cambodia and forcibly changed the regime
there.
China's move, taken in agreement with
and with the full knowledge of the Americans,
despite failure in the field - Vietnam resisted
valiantly and taught China a lesson - helped to
bolster Beijing-Washington relations. Yet a
quarter of a century later, the memory of that
invasion still haunts relations between China and
Vietnam.
So while Vietnam and the US are
now signing deals on military and intelligence
cooperation, possibly aimed in part at China,
Beijing is left in the cold, and its ties with
Washington are not nearly as idyllic as they were
27 years ago.
During his recent trip to
the US, Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai
signed various agreements for bilateral
cooperation in education, agriculture,
communications, healthcare, security and defense,
and agreed that Vietnam send military officers to
the US for training.
In this environment,
China's very troubled ties with Vietnam cast a
shadow over its relations with another neighbor -
North Korea.
The US and Japan are
pressuring China to squeeze Pyongyang over its
nuclear program and the stalled six-party talks on
that issue. The US especially wants China to force
Pyongyang to abandon its arms program, believing
that Beijing is the only country with sufficient
leverage over North Korea as China supplies it
with most of its food and energy needs.
One can see a clear pressure point there:
if you don't give up nuclear weapons, then we are
going to strangle your economy. The US must
clearly wonder why China is not willing to
exercise this pressure, if it really believes that
a nuclear North Korea is contrary to its interests
in the region.
All sorts of suspicions can
ensue: that China is playing a proxy soft war with
the US by touting a nuclear North Korea; Beijing
having a card to play in return for America going
easy in handling the Taiwan issue; using North
Korea as a prod to Japan, with whom Beijing's
relations are at a low.
So it would appear
that China feels it has everything to lose and
nothing to gain in giving up a nuclear North Korea
to the US, which is anyway growing suspicious of
China.
In any case, these are all
short-term tactical calculations that can be added
to the complex political equation about North
Korea. But China considers big political issues
from a long-term, historical perspective, and the
long-term advantages of a good partnership with
the US far outweigh all these short-term benefits.
On the other hand, America is far away and
it only came to Asia in the past 150 years - in
another 50 or 100 years it could be gone, while
Korea will forever be China's neighbor. Even in
the sort term, one wonders whether China can
afford to have, after Vietnam, another ex-ally
turned into an enemy.
Relations between China
and North Korea used to be "closer than lips and
teeth", closer than those between China and Vietnam.
And they are much more complex. China had some
400,000 soldiers killed in the Korean War in the
1950s. Even now, North Korea is unwilling to admit
how large China's contribution to the war was.
Many contemporary Chinese historians have begun to
doubt the wisdom of going to war in Korea in 1950,
instead of trying to get Taiwan back.
Certainly, North Korea would not have survived
without Chinese intervention, whereas Vietnam won the
war with America without China. In fact, America
warmed up to China in part to gain some advantage
in Vietnam during the war. This changed the
geopolitics of the time, but did not alter the
final result of the war.
Yet if
America had managed to reach out to China in a similar
way in 1950, Kim Il-sung would have most likely
become just a footnote in history. For the following
half century, North Korean leaders cleverly jockeyed
between Moscow and Beijing, favored by having
common borders with both countries. Vietnam could
never have done the same, as it does not share a
border with Russia.
Pyongyang's jockeying
came to a sudden halt with the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, and it was left to rely only
on China. But with this came more suspicion and
fear for China, as the Soviet collapse was
followed by Kim Il-sung's death in 1994, and the
crash of the North Korean economy.
A
decade later, North Korea's economic woes are not
over. Beijing wants Pyongyang to embrace the
Chinese style of economic reforms, but Pyongyang
is prudent, as it fears that such reforms would
capsize its political system.
North Korea
had survived for half a century thanks to generous
donations from Beijing and Moscow, both vying for
friendship. Then no one was vying for anything
from North Korea, and clever Kim Jong-il, who
succeeded his father, devised a new scheme:
instead of selling friendship, he would hold the
fate of his people, now starving, hostage. At the
same time, he would do nothing to decrease
military expenditure to help the starving, using
it instead to develop missiles, better if capped
with atomic warheads.
The goal is the same
as with the older Kim: sustain the North Korean
economy through donations, not by sustained
development. This increased China's leverage over
North Korea, as its main donor, but also decreased
China's room for maneuver, as Beijing - by giving,
or by not giving - could determine North Korea's
fate and thus arouse resentment in North Korea.
In other words, as China's relationship
with North Korea is deeper and longer than that
with Vietnam, the ramifications of the two falling
out are are much more serious. As such, China has
to think very carefully before it takes any action
that might threaten its ties with Pyongyang.
Despite all his blustering and bold
threats, Kim Jong-il is not mad enough to go to
war with any of his neighbors. Indeed, in the heat
of the Iraqi war, with the US preoccupied, he
could have caused trouble, but he stayed quiet. By
doing so he proved wiser and wilier than Taiwan,
which at that time pushed the envelope of polemics
with Beijing more than once, and ruffled many
feathers in Washington.
Cautious
approach
Nevertheless, there is justified
concern that Kim may have the bomb, or be close to
it, both in the US, which lived through the Cold
War, and in Japan, which has experienced atomic
bombs.
This calls for a cautious approach,
looking for long-term solutions. There is a good
argument for backing slow economic transformation
- the steady spread of cans of cola, growing
corruption among North Korean cadres doing
business with China - these could lead to more
meaningful changes than just twisting Kim's arm
now.
But it appears that as far as North
Korea is concerned, for the US there is more at
stake than a nuclear Pyongyang. With the six-party
talks, the US has been gauging China's overall
reliability. In other words, the talks were a way
to establish and build trust over a very sensitive
issue.
However, the US became side-tracked
with the "war on terror" and invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving China to deal with
North Korea. Yet now Washington finds that North
Korea is still as dangerous as ever, and still
refusing to join the six-party talks.
China might not have approved of the US's
rush methods, or could have been put off by its
difficulties with Japan, which was talking up the
"Korean threat" even as South Korea and China were
playing it down. This could have been viewed in
Beijing as an attempt by Japan to prevent the US
and China from getting too cozy, something that
could squeeze Japan in the middle.
When
countries come together, they normally have
different agendas, but the fact remains that there
seems to be no greater trust between the US and
China now than there was four years ago, when the
Korean talks started. So we can conclude that
China possibly did not see the opportunity to
improve bilateral trust, or failed to convince the
US in this respect.
There is growing
uneasiness in the US about China, fed by the many
voices raised against China National Offshore Oil
Company's US$18.5 billion bid for the US oil
company Unocal, and new intelligence reports on
enhanced Chinese military (especially
intercontinental missile) capabilities. Both
developments will put pressure on the US to take a
tougher stand against China.
There could
be another victim, and a bigger one, from this -
the six-party talks.
Francesco
Sisci is Asia editor of the Italian daily La
Stampa.
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