[China’s “traditionalist view that views the U.S. as a much greater threat than North Korea is deeply entrenched,” Bonnie S. Glaser, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in an email. “But the proponents of change are vocal, too. They argue that North Korea is a growing liability.”]
By Chris Buckley
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A military parade on
Saturday honoring the birthday of the founder of North Korea,
Kim Il-sung, in
Pyongyang, the capital. A debate has emerged in China over
whether the government
should abandon its longstanding patronage
of the North. Credit Wong
Maye-E/Associated Press
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BEIJING
— When China’s best-known
historian of the Korean War, Shen Zhihua, recently laid out his views on North
Korea, astonishment rippled through the audience. China, he said with a
bluntness that is rare here, had fundamentally botched its policy on the
divided Korean Peninsula.
China’s bond with North Korea’s Communist
leaders formed even before Mao Zedong’s decision in 1950 to send People’s
Liberation Army soldiers to fight alongside them in the Korean War. Mao
famously said the two sides were “as close as lips and teeth.”
But China should abandon the stale myths of
fraternity that have propped up its support for North Korea and turn to South
Korea, Mr. Shen said at a university lecture last month in Dalian, a
northeastern Chinese port city.
“Judging by the current situation, North
Korea is China’s latent enemy and South Korea could be China’s friend,” Mr.
Shen said, according to a transcript he published online. “We must see clearly
that China and North Korea are no longer brothers in arms, and in the short
term there’s no possibility of an improvement in Chinese-North Korean
relations.”
The speech was a strikingly bold public
challenge to Chinese policy, which remains unwilling to risk a break with North
Korea even as its nuclear program raises tensions in northeast Asia and beyond.
The controversy over Mr. Shen’s views in China has distilled a renewed debate
about whether the government should abandon its longstanding patronage of North
Korea.
China’s “traditionalist view that views the
U.S. as a much greater threat than North Korea is deeply entrenched,” Bonnie S.
Glaser, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, said in an email. “But the proponents of
change are vocal, too. They argue that North Korea is a growing liability.”
For decades, China has tried to preserve ties
with North Korea as a partner and strategic shield in northeast Asia, even when
the North’s leaders became testy and unpredictable. In recent years, though,
China has also tried to soothe the United States, build political and business
ties with South Korea and help rein in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
But as North Korea has improved its missiles
and nuclear warheads, opening the possibility that it could one day strike the
continental United States, China’s go-between approach has become increasingly
fraught.
North Korea did not hold a nuclear test over
the weekend that some had expected, and its missile test on Sunday fizzled. But
more tests and launches appear to be only a matter of time, and the Trump
administration has pressed China’s president, Xi Jinping, to use much tougher
pressure on its neighbor.
“The era of strategic patience is over,” Vice
President Mike Pence said in South Korea on Monday.
“The president and I have a great confidence
that China will properly deal with North Korea,” he told reporters, but “if
China is unable to deal with North Korea, the United States and our allies
will.”
China suspended coal imports from North Korea
in February, cutting off a major source of revenue for the North. But China has
resisted choking off trade with North Korea, and debate over how to balance
Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington has sharpened and become more fractious. Trying
to stay friends with all sides is proving perilous.
The Chinese government has fiercely objected
to an American antimissile defense system, called the Terminal High Altitude
Area Defense, or Thaad, being installed in South Korea, fearing it could be
used to spy on China. But some Chinese experts have criticized the surge of
anti-South Korean anger unleashed by Beijing as counterproductive.
Global Times, a state-run newspaper that
often defends Chinese government policy, cautioned last week that North Korea
would face harsher sanctions if it went ahead with another nuclear test. On
Monday, the paper redoubled that warning, calling for China to choke off most
oil supplies to North Korea if there was another test.
Mr. Shen has gone much further than other
scholars in calling for a reset.
“The fundamental interests of China and North
Korea are at odds,” he said in his lecture. “China’s fundamental interest lies
in achieving a stability on its borders and developing outward. But since North
Korea acquired nuclear weapons, that periphery has never been stable, so
inevitably Chinese and North Korean interests are at odds.”
He derided China’s opposition to the Thaad
antimissile system as shrill and self-defeating, needlessly alienating South
Korean opinion. “What we’ve done is exactly what the Americans and North
Koreans would like to see,” he said.
Mr. Shen’s views have incensed Chinese
ultranationalists, who have accused him of selling out the country’s ally in
Pyongyang. His views and the debate about them have not been reported in
Chinese state news media.
But Mr. Shen’s speech remains on the website
of the Cold War history research center at East China Normal University in
Shanghai, where he works. He has also restated his views at lectures in
Shanghai and, last week, in Xi’an in northwest China, he said.
In the past, articles in China critical of
North Korea have been quickly censored. In 2004, an influential Chinese policy
magazine was closed down after it published an essay critical of North Korea.
In 2013, an editor at a Communist Party journal in Beijing was shunted from his
job for publicly proposing that China withdraw support for North Korea.
Mr. Shen said the tolerance — so far — for his
views suggested that the government might be willing to tolerate greater
criticism of North Korea and debate about the relationship.
“Many people have asked me, ‘Teacher Shen,
why hasn’t your speech been taken down?’” Mr. Shen said in a telephone interview
from Shanghai.
“At least it shows that there can be
different views about the North Korea issue. It’s up to the center to set
policy, but at least you can air different views in public, whereas before you
couldn’t,” he said. The “center” refers to China’s central leadership.
Still, Ms. Glaser said, President Xi appears
unlikely to turn entirely on North Korea.
After a meeting with Mr. Xi, President Trump
said his Chinese counterpart seemed willing to press Pyongyang. But China has
balanced its criticisms of North Korea by pressing the United States to agree
to prompt negotiations with the North and suspend major military exercises with
the South.
In South Korea on Monday, Vice President
Pence held out the possibility of opening talks with the North Koreans, noting
that Washington was seeking security “through peaceable means, through
negotiations.”
His office added that any talks would include
Japan, South Korea, other allies in the region and China.
Mr. Shen, 66, is well known in China and is
often cited for his groundbreaking studies on the outbreak of the Korean War
that used archival records to expose the tensions and miscalculations behind
Mao’s decision to send troops.
He is the son of Communist Party officials
and previously used his earnings from business to pay for dredging archives in
Russia, after serving a two-year prison term on a charge of leaking state
secrets that he insisted was groundless.
He said he hoped that his research, including
a new history of Chinese-North Korean relations that he hopes will appear in
English this year, would dismantle deceptive myths that have grown up in China
around that past.
“It’s very hard for China to adjust
relations,” he said. “If everyone understands the truth and this myth is burst,
then there’ll be a basis among the public and officials for adjusting policy.”
But Mr. Shen acknowledged that shifting
direction on North Korea would carry risks. If political cooperation between
Beijing and Washington fails to constrain North Korea, he said, the two
governments should cooperate in a military response.
“If North Korea really does master nuclear
weapons and their delivery, then the whole world will have to prostrate itself
at the feet of North Korea,” he said in the interview. “The longer this drags out,
the better it is for North Korea.”
Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from
Seoul, South Korea.