[On Wednesday, Mr. Wang said the priority in the dispute over North Korea’s nuclear program was now “to flash the red light and apply brakes.” China’s “suspension for suspension” proposal “can help us break out of the security dilemma and bring the parties back to the negotiating table,” he said.]
By
Chris Buckley
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American soldiers during
a military exercise in Paju, South Korea, near the border
with North Korea,
on Tuesday. The United States began assembling a missile
defense system in South Korea this week.Credit Jung
Yeon-Je/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
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BEIJING
— China tried to cool newly
volatile tensions on the Korean Peninsula on Wednesday, proposing that North
Korea suspend its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for a halt to major
military exercises between American and South Korean forces.
Such concessions could pave the way for talks
aimed at a lasting settlement that would end North Korea’s nuclear ambitions,
the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, said at a news conference in Beijing.
The alternative to talks, he said, would be an increasingly perilous standoff
that threatened the entire region.
“The two sides are like two accelerating
trains coming toward each other, and neither side is willing to give way,” Mr.
Wang said. “The question is: Are both sides really prepared for a head-on
collision?”
Developments this week have abruptly
escalated regional tensions over the isolated North’s nuclear arms development.
After North Korea’s latest missile launch on Monday, the United States and
South Korea began deploying an antimissile system that China considers a threat
to its own security. Beijing accused the United States of risking a new arms
race in the region.
At the same time, the North is in a
diplomatic standoff with another Asian country, Malaysia, stemming from the
February killing of Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean leader’s estranged half
brother, in Kuala Lumpur. On Tuesday, Pyongyang — angered by a police
investigation that has named several North Koreans as suspects — said that no
Malaysians living in North Korea would be allowed to leave the country and
Malaysia quickly responded in kind.
On Wednesday, Mr. Wang said the priority in
the dispute over North Korea’s nuclear program was now “to flash the red light
and apply brakes.” China’s “suspension for suspension” proposal “can help us
break out of the security dilemma and bring the parties back to the negotiating
table,” he said.
But it was far from clear the idea would gain
traction. North Korea made a similar offer in 2015 that went nowhere. Neither
the Japanese nor South Korean governments rushed to endorse China’s latest
proposal.
Mr. Wang’s proposal was China’s latest
attempt to regain the initiative on the nuclear issue, which has bedeviled
Beijing’s efforts to stay friends with both North and South Korea and prove
itself a mature regional power broker.
“The current situation is a challenge for the
Chinese government’s diplomacy,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at
Renmin University in Beijing who specializes in North Korea. “The situation in
the East Asian region is increasingly complicated, and the possibility of a
diplomatic solution to the nuclear missile issue is increasingly slim,” he
said, referring to North Korea’s nuclear arms program.
Reining in North Korea has also become a
focus for the Trump administration’s dealings with China. Starting next week,
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson is to visit Japan, South Korea and China
for talks that will focus on “the advancing nuclear and missile threat” from
North Korea, the State Department said.
North Korea’s weapons advancements have
reached a point where “we do need to look at other alternatives,” Mark C.
Toner, a spokesman for the State Department, told reporters in Washington on
Tuesday. “And that’s part of what this trip is about, that we’re going to talk to
our allies and partners in the region to try to generate a new approach to
North Korea.”
But bringing the countries into agreement
over initial steps toward peace will not be easy, especially while China is
also in a deepening dispute with South Korea and the Trump administration. At
the same news conference where he laid out his proposal on Tuesday, Mr. Wang
stuck to China’s fierce opposition to the missile defense system the United
States began assembling in South Korea this week, known as Thaad, or Terminal
High Altitude Area Defense.
The Chinese government says the system goes
far beyond its declared purpose of warding off potential attacks by North
Korea, and could undermine China’s own military security. American and South
Korean officials say that is untrue, and that China should instead focus on
halting North Korea’s threats.
“It’s common knowledge that the monitoring
and early warning radius of Thaad reaches far beyond the Korean Peninsula and
compromises China’s strategic security,” Mr. Wang said at the news conference,
which was part of a regular round of briefings during China’s annual
legislative session. “It’s not the way that neighbors should treat each other,
and it may very well make South Korea less secure.”
Mr. Wang’s proposal for mutual suspensions
was an attempt to give new life to China’s long-running efforts to tamp down
confrontation between North and South Korea. China is the North’s only major
economic and security partner, but it has also developed strong economic and
political ties with South Korea — until the missile defense system threatened
to rupture the relationship.
For years, China hosted six-country talks on
North Korea’s nuclear program, which brought together North and South Korea,
China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
But those talks fell apart after 2009, and
North Korea has continued to test nuclear weapons and refine missiles that
could eventually carry nuclear warheads as far as the continental United
States. North Korea described its launch Monday of four ballistic missiles as
practice for hitting American military bases in Japan.
American officials, and many Chinese experts,
have grown skeptical that North Korea would ever seriously contemplate giving
up its nuclear weapons.
China’s rift with South Korea and the United
States over the missile defense system is likely to embolden North Korea,
making it more confident that Beijing would not turn on it, said Shen Dingli, a
professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who specializes in nuclear
proliferation issues.
“The deployment of Thaad has led to a serious
deterioration in Chinese-South Korean relations, so North Korea is delighted with
that,” Mr. Shen said in an interview. North Korea appeared to have gone past
the point where it would abandon its nuclear arms, he said. “There’s no
solution to this, because North Korean won’t give up its nuclear weapons.”
But Mr. Wang said that negotiations were the
only acceptable way to resolve the dispute.
“To resolve the nuclear issue, we have to
walk on both legs,” he said, “which means not just implementing sanctions, but
also restarting talks.”
North Korea’s ties to the global financial
system are also under renewed pressure. On Wednesday, the Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, issued a statement saying it
had recently moved to bar North Korean banks from accessing its platform.
Swift operates as part of the backbone of
global bank payment processing by providing a communication platform used by
central banks and financial institutions around the world.
Several North Korean banks that were subject
to sanctions by both the United Nations and the United States had continued as
recently as last year to find ways to access the Swift network, according to a
report by a United Nations expert panel that was published last week. Swift
said it was responding to an enforcement action by the authorities in Belgium,
where Swift is based, but it did not say when it moved to block the North
Korean banks from its service.
Neil Gough contributed reporting from Hong
Kong.
