[China sees living with a Communist-ruled nuclear-armed state on its border as preferable to the chaos of its collapse, Mr. Shi said. The Chinese leadership is confident that North Korea would not turn its weapons on China, and that China would control its neighbor by providing enough oil to keep its economy afloat.]
By Jane Perlez
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A man standing on a bridge
over the Yalu River that once linked the cities
of Sinuiju in North Korea and
Dandong in China’s Liaoning Province.
Credit Thomas Peter/Reuters
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BEIJING — North Korea’s biggest nuclear test,
conducted last week less than 50 miles from the Chinese border, sent tremors through
homes and schools in China’s northeast. But hours later, there was no mention
of the test on China’s state-run evening television news, watched by hundreds
of millions of viewers.
The decision on Friday to publicly ignore
stark evidence of Pyongyang’s expanding nuclear capabilities illustrated the
embarrassment that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, poses for his patrons in
Beijing.
But although North Korea remains nearly 100
percent dependent on China for oil and food, Chinese analysts say Beijing will
not modify its allegiance to North Korea or pressure the country to curtail its
drive for a full-fledged nuclear arsenal, as the United States keeps
requesting.
“The United States cannot rely on China for
North Korea,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at
Renmin University in Beijing. “China is closer to North Korea than the United
States.”
China sees living with a Communist-ruled
nuclear-armed state on its border as preferable to the chaos of its collapse,
Mr. Shi said. The Chinese leadership is confident that North Korea would not
turn its weapons on China, and that China would control its neighbor by
providing enough oil to keep its economy afloat.
The alternative is a strategic nightmare for
Beijing: a collapsed North Korean regime, millions of refugees piling into
China and a unified Korean Peninsula under an American defense treaty.
The Obama administration’s decision to deploy
an advanced missile defense system in South Korea also gives President Xi
Jinping of China less incentive to cooperate with Washington on a North Korea
strategy that could aim, for example, to freeze the North’s nuclear capacity,
the analysts said.
The American-supplied missile defenses in
South Korea, known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or Thaad,
has effectively killed any chance of China’s cooperating with the United
States, they said.
“China is strongly opposed to North Korea’s
nuclear weapons but at the same time opposes the defense system in South
Korea,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an assistant professor of international relations at
Renmin University. It is not clear which situation the Chinese leadership is
more agitated about, he said.
Beijing interprets the Thaad deployment as
another American effort to contain China. The system reinforces China’s view
that its alliance with North Korea is an integral part of China’s strategic
interests in Asia, with America’s treaty allies Japan and South Korea and tens
of thousands of American troops close by, Mr. Shi said.
Washington insists the Thaad system, due to
be installed in 2017, is intended to defend South Korea against North Korean
missiles, and is not aimed at China. The system “does not change the strategic
balance between the United States and China,” President Obama said after
meeting with Mr. Xi in Hangzhou, China, a week ago.
But China is not persuaded. Chinese officials
argue that the Thaad radar can detect Chinese missiles on the mainland,
undermining its nuclear deterrent.
So despite what Chinese analysts describe as
the government’s distaste for Mr. Kim and his unpredictable behavior, China’s
basic calculus on North Korea remains firm.
Mr. Xi would continue to ensure that North Korea
remained stable. The Chinese leader, 63, has shown disdain for the much younger
Mr. Kim, 32. He has not invited him to China, and has authorized only sporadic
visits by Chinese officials to Pyongyang. The two militaries remain largely
uninvolved with each other.
But the personal and professional antagonisms
do not alter Beijing’s goal of preventing a unification of North and South
Korea under an American defense arrangement.
The longstanding fear that punitive economic
action would destabilize North Korea makes it very unlikely that Beijing would
cooperate with the United States on more stringent sanctions at the United
Nations, according to Chinese analysts.
In March, after considerable hesitation,
China agreed to Washington’s appeals and signed on to tough United Nations
sanctions that included a ban on the export of North Korean coal.
Now as the West moves toward another round of
United Nations sanctions, China’s mood is very different, said a former senior
Chinese official who worked on North Korea. He said some officials were
wondering why China would work with the United States at the United Nations
after Washington went ahead with the antimissile system against Chinese wishes.
Meanwhile, the sanctions imposed in March
have been enforced in only a desultory fashion, trade experts said.
A loophole in the sanctions allows North
Korean coal to be sold if the proceeds go for humanitarian reasons, and that
opening seems to have been exploited, said Stephan Haggard, a Korea expert at
the University of California, San Diego.
The sale of coal since the sanctions came
into force was down 12 percent from the same period last year, a marginal
amount, he said.
On its own, the United States imposed
so-called secondary sanctions on business entities that do business with North
Korea and in the United States. But North Korean businesses have found Chinese
partners or are using front companies to use smaller Chinese banks, Mr. Haggard
said.
There are differing opinions in China about
whether an oil embargo — an unlikely punishment — would result in Mr. Kim’s
giving up his weapons.
If China stopped the flow of oil, North Korea
would face a severe economic crisis in about one year, and then face a choice
between keeping its economy going or compromising on its nuclear program, the
former senior official said.
It is possible that at that point Mr. Kim
would negotiate, the former official said.
But others disagree, saying the Chinese
government would not dare cut the oil supply, knowing that North Korea would be
able to get supplies from Russia and elsewhere.
“The fundamental reason for not cutting oil
is they don’t want to sacrifice the buffer zone, and they also know if they cut
off the oil supply it will not force Kim Jong-un to surrender his weapons,” Mr.
Shi said.
Mr. Shi questioned why China would want to
risk making North Korea into an enemy by cutting off the oil supply. “If you
cut off the oil, there is a 50 percent possibility North Korea will not
surrender their weapons, and they will hate China even more,” he said.
China’s continued support of North Korea is a
fundamental reason the United States should stop relying on China for progress
on reducing the North Korean nuclear threat, said Joel Wit, a visiting scholar
at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the School for Advanced International Studies at
Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Wit is among a group of American North Korea
experts who believe the United States should take the lead and negotiate with
the North.