[Last
month, Beijing showed a new willingness to punish its longtime ally when it
suspended imports of North Korean coal, saying it had reached the annual limit
allowed under United Nations sanctions. Customs figures later showed that China
had in fact imported only about 30 percent of the quota for 2017.]
By Jane Perlez
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Aboard the aircraft
carrier Carl Vinson during a South Korea-United States joint
military exercise
in seas east of the Korean Peninsula this month. China had
proposed that the United States suspend military exercises with South Korea
in exchange for a suspension
of the North’s missile and nuclear programs,
to establish a basis for
negotiations. Credit Jung Yeon-Je/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
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BEIJING
— Secretary of State Rex W.
Tillerson signaled on Friday that the Trump administration was prepared to
scrap nearly a decade of United States policy toward North Korea in favor of a
more aggressive effort to eliminate the country’s nuclear weapons program.
Whether that means pre-emptive action, which he warned was “on the table,” will
depend a great deal on how China responds.
North Korea relies on Chinese trade and aid
to keep its economy afloat, and China has long been unwilling to withdraw that
support. Up to 40 percent of the North’s foreign currency — essential for
buying goods abroad — comes from a network of about 600 Chinese companies,
according to a recent study by Sayari Analytics, a Washington financial
intelligence firm.
Mr. Tillerson went to China on Saturday, a
day after saying in Seoul, South Korea, that the United States would not
negotiate with North Korea on freezing its nuclear and missile programs. His
interactions with his hosts in Beijing, and whether he takes a hard line with
China over its support for North Korea, will be closely watched — as will be
China’s response.
A sign of the administration’s stance came on
Friday as President Trump criticized both North Korea and the Chinese
government. “North Korea is behaving very badly,” he said on Twitter. “They
have been ‘playing’ the United States for years. China has done little to
help!”
The Chinese leadership is likely to bristle
at such criticism, but it may be reviewing its options, given the collision
course that North Korea and the United States seem to be on.
Last month, Beijing showed a new willingness
to punish its longtime ally when it suspended imports of North Korean coal,
saying it had reached the annual limit allowed under United Nations sanctions.
Customs figures later showed that China had in fact imported only about 30
percent of the quota for 2017.
Yang Xiyu, a veteran Chinese diplomat
involved with North Korea, said Mr. Tillerson may be able to persuade Chinese
leaders to do more when he meets with them in Beijing this weekend,
particularly against Chinese companies that do business with the North.
Mr. Yang cited as a potential model the case
that United States officials built last year against a Chinese executive
accused of selling North Korea a chemical that can be used in nuclear-enrichment
centrifuges. While Beijing was not happy about the case, it eventually accepted
it. “It wasn’t easy, but it was the right way to push the issue to a solution,”
he said.
When the United States filed criminal charges
against the businesswoman, Ma Xiaohong, the owner of the Dandong Hongxiang
Industrial Development Company, other Chinese companies conducting similar
transactions were apparently left untouched.
But Mr. Yang, who was a top negotiator for
China during six-nation talks with North Korea from 2003 to 2009, suggested
that those companies may now be vulnerable.
If the United States continues to present
evidence of illegal activities that contravene China’s responsibilities under
United Nations sanctions, “there is a great deal of room for cooperation,” he
said. He noted that China had published five executive orders, totaling more
than 900 pages, listing items banned from export to North Korea.
“Such activities violate China’s adherence to
those orders,” he said.
Mr. Yang added: “The United States should
say, ‘Let’s extend our cooperation to implementation of the United Nations
resolutions on sanctions.’ They should say, ‘Starting with the Hongxiang case,
let’s move forward.’”
In Beijing, Mr. Tillerson met with China’s
top foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, and the foreign minister, Wang Yi, on
Saturday. He will see President Xi Jinping on Sunday.
“We have committed ourselves to do everything
we can to prevent a conflict from breaking out,” Mr Tillerson said at a press
conference after meeting Mr. Wang.
The secretary said China and the United
States “will work together” to see if they could make North Korea take “a
course correction and move away from nuclear weapons.”
Mr. Tillerson declined to specify the “number
of steps” that would be taken to achieve that goal.
Over the past quarter-century, the Chinese
government has been unwilling to cripple the North Korean economy, fearing a
refugee crisis or a destabilizing conflict on its border. North Korea imports
virtually all of its oil from China, and cutting off the spigot could severely
undermine the North Korean economy. Doing so, however, would almost certainly
cause chaos in North Korea, something China fears.
Round after round of economic sanctions have
failed to persuade North Korea’s leaders to abandon their nuclear ambitions.
China has long justified its support for
North Korea on humanitarian grounds, and rejected accusations that it has been
unwilling to get tough on Pyongyang.
But with North Korea closing in on its goal
of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear
payload to the United States, and the Trump administration deploying a missile
defense system to South Korea that China considers a threat to its security,
the Chinese leadership’s calculus may be shifting.
“It is not a foregone conclusion that China’s
leaders will shelter North Korea,” Anthony Ruggiero, a former United States
Treasury official involved in sanctions enforcement against Pyongyang, told a
congressional panel last month.
Mr. Ruggiero said the United States would be
likeliest to achieve Chinese cooperation from a position of strength.
In 2013, he noted, when the Treasury
blacklisted North Korea’s primary foreign exchange bank for contributing to the
proliferation of nuclear materials, the Bank of China, one of China’s major
commercial banks, immediately closed its account with the North Korean outfit.
Now, no major Chinese banks deal with North
Korea for fear of being penalized by the United States, though smaller ones do,
along with front companies operating along the North Korean border with few
links to the United States financial system, according to American sanctions
experts.
“This is a good example of China acting to
cut off North Korea’s activities inside China when those actions threaten
China’s economic interests,” Mr. Ruggierio said of the Bank of China’s
severance of its North Korea connections.
A more recent episode that could serve as a
model came last week, when the United States Department of Commerce fined ZTE,
one of China’s biggest technology companies, $1.19 billion for breaking
sanctions and selling electronics to Iran and North Korea.
“This is what the U.S. should be doing, but
finding it out ain’t easy,” said Stephan Haggard, a visiting fellow at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics, which is based in Washington.
“I think that Commerce pretty much had a gun to ZTE’s head.”
Officials in the Trump administration have
discussed putting pressure on Chinese banks through “secondary sanctions,”
which would make it hard for any bank that did business with the North to also
deal in American dollars. That technique worked against Iran, helping to force
it to the negotiating table over its own nuclear program.
But such measures are likely to have much
less impact in North Korea, which is already isolated, than they did in Iran, a
major trading nation, sanctions experts said.
“North Korea has one of the smallest
international trade profiles on earth,” said Joseph M. DeThomas, a former
American ambassador who served as a State Department adviser on Iran and North
Korea sanctions. “North Korea often has to end-run the entire financial system
to move money. They do things the old-fashioned way: sending guys on airplanes
with suitcases full of money.”
In an opinion article this week in The New
York Times, a former United States deputy secretary of state, Antony J.
Blinken, said the Obama administration had quietly pressed countries to eject
North Korean workers whose remittances help fund the country’s military. He did
not say how successful that effort had been. Tens of thousands of such workers
are employed in China’s northeastern cities like Dandong and Hunchun, along the
North Korean border.
But Marcus Noland, of the Peterson Institute
for International Economics, said he believed the organized export of labor
earned the North Korean government less than has often been reported — hundreds
of millions of dollars per year, probably less than half a billion, he said.
“The next time you hear the claim of $2 billion annual earnings from the
organized export of labor, remember not to believe everything you hear,” he
said.
Far more has been contributed in foreign
currency by Chinese companies doing trade across the border, said Jessica
Knight, director of analysis at Sayari Analytics. “Customs data indicates more
than $8 billion in cross-border trade between China and North Korea since 2013,
much of it in commodities like coal and steel,” she said.
Whether any sanctions at all will deter the
North from its nuclear pursuits is far from clear. The former United States
defense secretary William J. Perry, who dealt with the North Korean problem
during the Clinton administration, said on Friday in Beijing that he doubted
they would.
“We have sanctioned them a hundred times, and
it didn’t stop developing nuclear weapons,” he said. “They seem to be prepared
to suffer economic deprivation for the people so they can achieve the
preservation of the regime, which they think that nuclear weapons is going to
do for them.”
Chris Buckley contributed reporting, and
Yufan Huang contributed research.