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China shows its hand on North
Korea
By Jaewoo Choo
SEOUL -
Critics of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun are still
going over the details of his recent visit to China,
obsessed with finding some some faux pas of the kind
they observed during his first two official overseas
trips, to the United States in May and to Japan in June.
But the Beijing summit was much more important for what
it revealed about Roh's counterpart, Chinese President
Hu Jintao, on issues regarding the Korean Peninsula.
Unlike on his previous trips to the US and
Japan, Roh did not directly use the visit to China as an
opportunity to seek support for his idea of transforming
South Korea into a Northeast Asia hub for logistics,
services and the information-technology industry.
Instead, he approached the subject using language
designed to avoid insulting China's traditional
Sinocentrism sentiment, a long tradition of regarding
itself as the center of the world. To Roh's dismay, Hu
offered no more than rhetorical support for Roh's
Northeast Asia blueprint, while consistently maintaining
an unyielding posture on the idea of stability and peace
on the Korean Peninsula, rather than Northeast Asia.
Throughout his public speech, Hu very successfully
avoided the term "Northeast Asia" when describing
China's concern for the region's future security.
Hu's calculation is simple, and so are the
meanings behind his reasoning. First, stability and
peace in Northeast Asia are unthinkable and unrealizable
by a simple consensus and agreement by just two nations,
China and South Korea. The region is much more
complicated than that. Its international system involves
too many great players to achieve harmony toward this
end. As one of the major regional actors, China has to
be aware of what the others would have to say regarding
this issue, and therefore is not willing to make the
first move.
Second, if South Korea truly and
honestly wanted to pursue its blueprint for Northeast
Asian security with the Chinese leadership, Roh should
have gone to China sooner. At his inauguration, China
was the first country to extend an invitation to South
Korea's newly elected president. Although Roh humbly
accepted the invitation with much gratitude, he took too
long of a detour before arriving in Beijing, going to
Washington first and then to Tokyo. Chinese officials
joke about the fact that this was Roh's third official
overseas trip, but their smiles are rather bitter.
Third, Hu's attitude showed China's true
position regarding regional affairs, as one of the major
regional powers. As if to prove this point, Hu
consistently restricted the scope of the peace and
stability issue to the Korean Peninsula. Creating a much
more secure international environment has long been one
of the highest priorities in China's contemporary
diplomacy. But Hu's remarks relayed a message to Seoul
that, as far as Beijing is concerned, South Korea is no
longer in a position to discuss Northeast Asian regional
affairs eye to eye, head to head with China.
Hu's position on the regional issue was also
confirmed by his affirmative statement on his nation's
relations with North Korea. Despite the fact that Hu
treated Roh's as a national visit, the Chinese leader's
words at the post-summit press conference on July 7 may
have lent some comfort to Pyongyang. When questioned at
the press conference regarding China's willingness to
play a much more active role in inducing North Korea to
multilateral talks to resolve Pyongyang's nuclear
standoff with the Washington, Hu with a simple sentence
removed any doubt about China's ability to do so. That
is, there is an effective communication channel between
Beijing and Pyongyang at work. By using the word
changtong ("operating normally"), Hu attempted to
prove that his nation maintains a good line of
communication with North Korea.
Another
disconnection between Roh and Hu came with their
different perceptions on each other's role in solving
the North Korean nuclear crisis. While Roh kept
insisting that China should play a more "active" role in
the process, Hu, gracefully turning down the offer,
limited his nation's role to a "constructive" one. In
theory, the two nations, as emphasized in the joint
statement, are in total harmony on the fundamental
principles for handling of the nuclear crisis. These
principles encompass denuclearization of the peninsula,
no acceptance of nuclear-weapons development on the
peninsula, and a peaceful solution of the North Korean
nuclear crisis. In reality, however, the two nations are
very much different in their orientation on handling the
crisis.
Since there is not a fixed paradigm for
a peaceful solution of the crisis, it is quite natural
for China to assume and maintain a constructive role.
China will continuously seek a way to help build an
appropriate framework for a peaceful solution. However,
because of the need for coordination and cooperation
with such major powers as the United States, Russia and
Japan, China's reluctance to accept Roh's offer of an
active role is understandable. Until there is a
finalized equation for a peaceful solution, Roh and his
government are jumping way ahead of everybody, not just
China.
Given the circumstances, Roh has once
again experienced utter failure in realizing South
Korea's dream of expanding the current three-party talks
to a party of five or six. As proved by its efforts in
hosting the three-party talks, China indeed has adopted,
and accepted, the idea of multilateral talks as the
fundamental formula for a peaceful solution of the North
Korean nuclear problem. Under the Chinese
interpretation, however, limiting the parties to three -
the US, North Korea and itself - falls within the
definition of "multilateralism". As to whether the
number of parties should be expanded, China seemingly
remains unwilling to go any farther, for there are too
many variables that it has to review in regards to its
position, as well as its role and influence in the
picture.
Jaewoo Choo, PhD, is a
research fellow with the Trade Research Institute,
Seoul. The opinions expressed in this article are his
own.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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