April 6, 2013

DETECTING SHIFT, U.S. MAKES CASE TO CHINA ON NORTH KOREA

[Judging whether China has genuinely changed course on North Korea is tricky: Beijing has appeared to respond to American pressure before, only to backtrack later. China, the North’s only strong ally, has long feared the United States would capitalize on the fall of the North Korean leadership by expanding American military influence on the Korean Peninsula.]
Lee Jae-Won/Reuters
United States Army Patriot missile batteries were placed at an American air 
base in Osan, south of Seoul. Tension has risen in the region as North Korea 
continues to make bellicose threats.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, detecting what it sees as a shift in decades of Chinese support for North Korea, is pressuring China’s new president, Xi Jinping, to crack down on the regime in Pyongyang or face a heightened American military presence in its region.
In a flurry of exchanges that included a recent phone call from President Obama to Mr. Xi, administration officials said, they have briefed the Chinese in detail about American plans to upgrade missile defenses and other steps to deter the increasingly belligerent threats made by North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.
China, which has been deeply suspicious of the American desire to reassert itself in Asia, has not protested publicly or privately as the United States has deployed ships and warplanes to the Korean Peninsula. That silence, American officials say, attests to both Beijing’s mounting frustration with the North and the recognition that its reflexive support for Pyongyang could strain its ties with Washington.
“The timing of this is important,” Tom Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, said in an interview. “It will be an important early exercise between the United States and China, early in the term of Xi Jinping and early in the second term of President Obama.”
While administration officials cautioned that Mr. Xi has been in office for only a few weeks and that China has a history of frustrating the United States in its dealings with North Korea, Mr. Donilon said he believed that China’s position was “evolving.”
Judging whether China has genuinely changed course on North Korea is tricky: Beijing has appeared to respond to American pressure before, only to backtrack later. China, the North’s only strong ally, has long feared the United States would capitalize on the fall of the North Korean leadership by expanding American military influence on the Korean Peninsula.
Nor has China given clues about its intentions in its public statements, voicing grave concern about the rising tensions while being careful not to elevate Mr. Kim’s stature.
Chinese analysts say there are internal debates within the Communist Party and the military about how to deal with Mr. Kim, and how strongly to enforce the United Nations’ economic sanctions that China signed on to last month.
The White House said it was encouraged by how swiftly China had supported the sanctions, which followed a North Korean nuclear test and a missile launch. But some diplomats and analysts say China has dragged its feet in enforcing them.
In a meeting with two senior American officials who traveled to Beijing two weeks ago to try to persuade China to enforce new banking restrictions on North Korea, Chinese banking leaders showed little sign of compliance, said Marcus Noland, an expert on North Korea at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
“But I wouldn’t expect them publicize it,” even if they did move ahead, Mr. Noland added.
Many analysts say the sanctions cannot succeed without China’s cooperation, since it has close trade ties with North Korea and has in the past chosen to keep its government afloat by providing fuel and significant aid.
China continues to say economic sanctions will not work. A Chinese diplomat who is involved in policy on North Korea said recently that he thought China would enforce the new United Nations sanctions to a point but would not go as far as the Obama administration wanted.
Even if China does cooperate, it is unclear how far North Korea might bend; North Korea ignored China’s entreaties not to conduct the nuclear test in February that set off the latest conflict with the United States and South Korea.
In the coming weeks, the White House will send a stream of senior officials to China to press its case, starting with Secretary of State John Kerry, who will travel to Beijing next Saturday, on an Asian tour that will also take him to South Korea and Japan.
In the short run, officials said, the administration wants the Chinese to be rigorous in customs inspections to interdict the flow of banned goods to North Korea. More broadly, it wants China to persuade Mr. Kim to cease his provocations and agree to negotiations on giving up his nuclear program.
On Friday, North Korea stoked tensions further by advising Russia, Britain and other countries that they might want to evacuate their embassies in Pyongyang in case of hostilities, according to Russian and British officials. Analysts dismissed the warning as a ploy to frighten the United States and its allies, perhaps to finally force concessions.
In Beijing, officials said Mr. Kerry also wants to reinvigorate the dialogue with China on climate change. And the United States is pushing the Chinese leadership to crack down on the proliferation of cyberattacks on American government and commercial interests originating in China.
Making progress on those issues will be easier if Washington is in sync with Beijing over North Korea. A week after Mr. Kerry’s visit, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will spend four days in China to try to improve communication between the American and Chinese militaries. Any problem there is especially dangerous now, officials say, given China’s expanded military ambitions and the intensified American activity in the region.
Mr. Donilon plans to visit Beijing in May. Part of the heavy rotation of diplomacy, officials said, is to compensate for the fact that Mr. Obama is not scheduled to meet Mr. Xi until September.
Based on their meetings with Mr. Xi so far, administration officials said they believed he viewed Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang more pragmatically than his predecessor, Hu Jintao, whose reluctance to act against Pyongyang so frustrated Mr. Obama that in 2010 he accused the Chinese of “willful blindness” toward North Korea.
Last month, Mr. Xi spoke by phone with the new president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, telling Ms. Park how much China prized its ties with South Korea and offering China’s assistance in the “reconciliation and cooperation” of the two Koreas. Such sentiments, analysts said, would have been inconceivable from President Hu.
By contrast, there has been little high-level contact between Mr. Kim and Chinese officials, which American officials cited as evidence of growing irritation on the part of the Chinese.
“What we have seen is a subtle change in Chinese thinking,” Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, said in a speech Thursday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The Chinese now believe North Korea’s actions are “antithetical” to their national security interests, he said.
That thinking has also surfaced in recent articles by Chinese scholars that have called into question China’s policy. Deng Yuwen, the influential deputy editor of a Communist Party journal, wrote in The Financial Times that “Beijing should give up on Pyongyang and press for the reunification of the Korean Peninsula.”
And yet Mr. Deng has since been suspended from his job, which underscores how little China’s attitude has changed.
Some voices are urging China not to be rattled by the crisis. A hawkish major general in the People’s Liberation Army, Luo Yuan, who often writes in the Chinese state-run news media, appeared unperturbed by the actions of Mr. Kim or by the dispatch of American ships and planes in support of South Korea.
When the current American and South Korean joint military exercises end this month, he wrote in a blog post on China’s social media site, Sina Weibo, North Korea will calm down and return to the status quo of “no war, no unification,” which remains in China’s favor.
Jeffrey A. Bader, a former Asia adviser to Mr. Obama, said he believes that any change will be subtle. The Chinese, he said, “will continue to use similar language, and their public demeanor will be similar, but quietly, they will be much more aggressive, much more fed up and much more prepared to treat North Korea differently than in the past.”
Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Beijing, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.