China's 'two-faced' nuclear
stance By Todd Crowell
HUA HIN, Thailand - Are the Chinese
playing a double game on the issue of North Korean
nuclear disarmament? Syndicated columnist Tom
Plate evidently thinks so. In his latest column he
suggests darkly a "secret pro-nuclear
understanding between Beijing and Pyongyang".
In other words, Beijing tells the world
and Washington that it favors a Korean Peninsula
free of nuclear weapons, while quietly telling the
North Koreans to resist any overtures from the
other
participants in the six-party
talks to dismantle its nuclear program.
The column is filled with heavy, loaded
words, such as "big lie", "two-faced",
"Machiavellian", "bad faith", "secret
double-dealer" and so on, but it is light on
specifics. He cites a "nasty rumor" about China
playing a double game in the aftermath of Chinese
President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Washington
and a sense that Hu's response on the matter of a
nuclear-free Korea was "far less emphatic than
Bush's". He didn't elaborate on the rumor.
I have always had a lot of respect for
Plate's work, and he is certainly no knee-jerk
China-basher, so you have to wonder just what set
him off. Surely it couldn't have been
pronouncements of the summit. How can anyone take
seriously anything that came out of that
misbegotten meeting?
If people think China
is playing a double game, it may be because they
have set themselves up for disillusionment by
becoming victims of their own rhetoric about how
important China is to reaching a resolution of the
Korean nuclear issue.
It has often been
said that China could bring Pyongyang around to an
agreement any time it chose to do so by simply
withdrawing aid and trade. This is undoubtedly
true, but Beijing has said more than once, openly
and up front, that it will not do this. Nothing
two-faced about it.
The Chinese are not
particularly worried whether North Korea has an
atomic bomb. They don't believe Pyongyang would be
stupid enough to drop one on them. Historically,
China has not been concerned about nuclear
non-proliferation. Indeed, it is a recovering
proliferator herself.
The North Korean
nuclear program concerns China because it concerns
the United States. The Chinese worry that it might
trigger a US attack on North Korea, something they
obviously don't want, even as the threat of its
actually happening recedes.
China's main
interest in hosting the six-party talks is to be a
good world citizen, reap the prestige that comes
in helping broker any diplomatic breakthroughs and
garner any rewards that might come its way. Beyond
that it is indifferent to whether North Korea has
a bomb.
The South Koreans, too, are not
overly worried about a North Korean bomb. Deep
down they don't believe that their Korean brothers
would ever drop one on them. Seoul is currently
obsessed with reconciliation with Pyongyang and
will not countenance anything that impedes that
goal.
This posture might change if the
conservative opposition wins the South Korean
presidency in late 2007, but it is doubtful a new
president would do much to alter the situation
except possibly to put more emphasis on human
rights. The "Sunshine Policy" initiated by former
president Kim Dae-jung is too popular to be
abandoned no matter who is president.
One
might think that of the six parties to the
negotiations, Japan would take the strongest
stand, having the most to fear. After all, the
North Koreans have fired ballistic missiles in
their direction in the past.
But I was in
Japan a year ago in February when North Korea
formally declared itself to be a nuclear-weapons
state, and the reaction in Japan was
underwhelming, to say the least. The headline in
the Japan Times read: "Announcement might
complicate abduction issue", which pretty much
shows where Tokyo's priorities lie - an accounting
for its nationals abducted by Pyongyang.
Of course, the reaction might have been
entirely different if the North Koreans had proved
their assertion beyond a doubt by actually
exploding an atomic bomb. There is a school of
thought that believes - or wishes to believe -
that North Korea does not have a bomb because it
has not mastered all the elements of producing a
workable weapon. Plutonium bombs are tricky.
Supposedly the US is the one participant
most committed to ending North Korea's
nuclear-weapons program. But the ink was no sooner
dry on the "breakthrough" September 19 agreement
at the last session of the six-party talks than
Washington raised the extraneous issue of
Pyongyang's counterfeiting US currency.
This may be a legitimate beef on the part
of Washington, but how can a few million fake
US$100 notes weigh against the prospect of a
mushroom cloud somewhere in the United States?
One has to wonder what kind of game
Washington is playing. If this is some kind of
gambit in the complicated game to bring Pyongyang
to the negotiating table, it is too Machiavellian
- to use Plate's words - for me to understand.
In this long, weary story, the US has
dragged out delivery of the aid and recognition it
promised when North Korea agreed to freeze its
nuclear-weapons program in 1994. For its part,
Pyongyang violated the spirit by experimenting
with uranium enrichment. You don't have to look to
China alone to find plenty of bad faith.
Todd Crowell is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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