[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.]
By Mark Landler
 |
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.