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What China should do about North
Korea
By Shiping Tang
BEIJING - While the
rest of the world's attention has been focused on Iraq
for the past couple months, countries in East Asia have
had something else to worry about: the ongoing standoff
between North Korea and the United States.
Many
American pundits, from (neo)conservatives such as
William Safire to (neo)liberals such asThomas Friedman,
had long wondered why China had not helped, and White
House officials lamented that China seemed to be
motionless on the issue. Unsurprisingly, when US
Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Beijing this
year, one of his main messages was that China should do
more, much more, to help the United States get out of
the impasse. After all, North Korea is much closer to
China than to the United States.
This week,
North Korea agreed to talks with the United States and
China. North Korea's new willingness to participate in
multilateral discussions seems to indicate that China
has quietly done something in the past couple weeks. But
China must be careful how it helps.
First and
foremost, one can still doubt that the administration of
US President George W Bush is really interested in
resolving conflicts through dialogue, because recently
it has shown more interest in resolving them with action
in the form of smart weapons. Therefore, the problem of
the US-North Korea standoff may not be a lack of
solution; rather, the problem may be that Washington
does not want a solution other than a complete
capitulation or implosion of North Korea.
Second, as James T Laney and Jason T Shaplen
noted in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, before
Bush's "axis of evil" speech, Pyongyang had actually
taken many encouraging steps toward openness and
cooperation with the international community, and if the
Bush administration had responded positively to
Pyongyang's overtures, we probably would not have this
mess at hand today. Even after North Korea took the
unusual step of proposing a freeze of its nuclear and
missile programs in exchange for a non-aggression
guarantee by Washington, Bush remained unmoved.
Therefore, to shift all the blame to Pyongyang would be
a mistake, because that would increase Pyongyang's sense
of vulnerability and complicate the negotiation process.
Third, unlike former US president Bill Clinton,
who warmed up to former South Korean president Kim
Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" after some initial
hesitation, Bush indicated early on that he wanted no
"Sunshine" at all by personally snubbing Kim in
Washington. Only after pressure generated from the
short-lived but self-propelled South-North
reconciliation did Bush come to realize that the United
States needed to take some action. His purpose, though,
may not be to help the course of South-North
reconciliation, but to reclaim the right of managing
business in Northeast Asia.
Indeed, Bush's
policy can be traced back to a leaked Pentagon policy
review in 1991, drafted by then under secretary of
defense Paul Wolfowitz (now deputy defense secretary).
The policy review contended that the strategic
imperative for the United States was to preserve its
primacy and prevent any state or coalition of states
from challenging US primacy.
Following that
logic, the worst nightmare for Washington may not be a
nuclear North Korea (after all, Washington well knows
that North Korea can be deterred even though it claims
the opposite) but a reunified Korea that may ask
Washington to remove or reduce its troops, thus
diminishing the strategic position that Washington now
holds against Russia, and China in particular. To avoid
that unpleasant scenario, the best tactics for
Washington are to prolong the division of the peninsula.
Yet a successful South-North reconciliation and
an eventual peaceful reunification may actually do the
United States and the whole of Northeast Asia much good.
If a reunified Korea chooses to be a neutral state with
the support of the United States, China, Japan, Russia,
and the larger international community, it could
actually serve as a foundation for cooperation between
the powers.
Unfortunately, there is little
evidence that Washington is ready to look at things in a
non-zero-sum way. And unless Washington can change its
hard-nosed realist mindset, the world should not expect
a breakthrough between Washington and Pyongyang.
But China can still do a few things for the long
term, even if the talks cannot produce much.
First, China must make it clear that while it
does not object to - indeed has now facilitated -
multilateral discussion, it is imperative that the
United States and North Korea work hard toward a mutual
understanding.
Second, China must work closely
with South Korea, Russia, and Japan to map out a
framework for what kind of role the four countries can
play if the United States and North Korea do reach an
accord.
Third, and perhaps most important, if
the United States is to show no sincerity in resolving
the crisis with negotiation even under the multilateral
forum, Beijing should just tell Pyongyang to forget
about Washington for a while and think of a "third way";
other than brinkmanship and setting things right with
Washington, Pyongyang can actually work with Seoul
closely and force Washington to play its hand according
to the wishes of Koreans, instead of the other way
around.
The crucial link in this "third way", if
course, is that Seoul must understand that the Koreans
themselves should dictate the pace of the reconciliation
process, not any other external powers. The policy of
reconciliation must stay the course even if Washington
wants nothing of it.
Only then can the Koreas
control their own destinies, because as long as the
Korean reconciliation-reunification process makes steady
progress, regional powers and Washington will have to
play along. It is imperative that Seoul and Pyongyang
quickly grasp this fact.
Shiping Tang
is deputy director of the Center for Regional Security
Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing.
He is also a co-director of the Sino-American Security
Dialogue. The opinions expressed here are his personal
views.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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