[China’s path to dominance requires an American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on the United States for protection. But North Korea threatens to draw the United States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.]
By Jane Perlez
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The North Korean leader
Kim Jong-un with Liu Yunshan, a Chinese official,
at a military parade in
Pyongyang in 2015. Credit Korean
Central News Agency
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BEIJING
— The two men stood together
on the reviewing stand in the North Korean capital: a top official in China’s
Communist leadership wearing a tailored business suit and a young dictator in a
blue jacket buttoned to his chin.
Liu Yunshan, the visiting Chinese dignitary,
and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, tried to put on a show of friendship,
chatting amiably as the cameras rolled, but just as often they stood silent,
staring ahead as a military parade passed before them.
Nearly two years have elapsed since that
encounter, the last high-level visit between China and North Korea. The stretch
of time is a sign of the distance between two nations with a torturous history:
one a rising power seeking regional dominance, the other an unpredictable
neighbor with its own ambitions.
China has made little secret of its long-term
goal to replace the United States as the major power in Asia and assume what it
considers its rightful position at the center of the fastest-growing, most
dynamic region in the world.
But North Korea, which defied Beijing by
testing a sixth nuclear bomb on Sunday, has emerged as an unexpected and
persistent obstacle.
Other major hurdles litter China’s path. The
United States, despite signs of retreat in Asia under the Trump administration,
remains the dominant military power. And India and Japan, China’s traditional
rivals in the region, have made clear that they intend to resist its
gravitational pull.
Yet North Korea — an outcast of the
international order that Beijing hopes to lead, but also a nuclear state in
part because of China’s own policies — presents a particularly nettlesome
challenge.
China’s path to dominance requires an
American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on
the United States for protection. But North Korea threatens to draw the United
States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish
its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.
At the same time, the strategic location of
the North — and its advancing nuclear capabilities — make it dangerous for
China to restrain it.
“North Korea may not be the biggest problem
to China, but it does add a unique and very serious dimension to China’s task
of supplanting America in East Asia,” said Hugh White, a former strategist for
the Australian Defense Department. “That’s because it is the only East Asian
power with nuclear weapons.”
Even if the United States steps back from the
region, Mr. White added, “North Korea’s capability means China can never be able
to dominate the region as much as its leaders today probably hope.”
The Trump administration has bet on China to
stop North Korea’s nuclear program, shunning talks with Mr. Kim and gambling
that Beijing can be persuaded to use its economic leverage over the North to
rein it in.
But in doing so, the White House may be
misreading the complexity of China’s relationship with North Korea, one that
successive generations of Chinese leaders have struggled to manage.
A
New Cold War
There is growing resentment against Mr. Kim
inside China, both in the general public and the policy establishment. China
keeps North Korea running with oil shipments and accounts for almost all its
foreign trade. But to many Chinese, the young leader seems ungrateful.
A three-day academic seminar in Shanghai last
month brought together some critics, who question North Korea’s value to
Beijing as a strategic buffer against South Korea and Japan — and warn that the
North could prompt them to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
“The cost is to continue to alienate Japan,
enrage the United States and irritate South Korea,” said Zhu Feng, a professor
of international relations at Nanjing University. “If Japan and South Korea
feel forced to go for radical options like nuclear weapons, it will badly
affect regional diplomacy.”
The spread of nuclear weapons, he added,
would thrust China into “a new Cold War” in Asia, perhaps with a beefed-up
American military presence. That would frustrate Beijing’s ambitions for
regional supremacy while also leaving it vulnerable to being labeled an enabler
of nuclear proliferation, tarnishing its international reputation.
“A balance of mutually assured destruction in
Northeast Asia will not be a satisfactory situation for anyone,” said Bilahari
Kausikan, a former foreign secretary for Singapore. “But it will not
necessarily be unstable, and it may be of some small consolation to Washington,
Tokyo and Seoul that the implications for Beijing are somewhat worse.”
President Xi Jinping is said to be aware of
such risks and to have privately expressed disdain for Mr. Kim.
But like his predecessors, he has resisted
punishing sanctions that might cause North Korea’s collapse and lead to a
destabilizing war on its border, a refugee crisis in China’s economically
vulnerable northeast, or a unified Korean Peninsula controlled by American
forces.
All these possibilities could pose as much a
problem for China’s plans for ascendancy in Asia as an arms race in the region.
And if North Korea somehow survived, it would remain on China’s border, angry
and aggrieved.
From Mr. Xi’s perspective, a hostile neighbor
armed with nuclear weapons may be the worst outcome.
The
Pakistan Connection
China has more nuclear-armed neighbors than
any country in the world: Russia, India, Pakistan and now North Korea. But that
situation is partly one of its own making.
The origins of North Korea’s nuclear program
can be traced to a deal in 1976 between an ailing Mao Zedong and Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan.
India had tested its first nuclear bomb two
years earlier, and Mr. Bhutto wanted to keep up. China viewed India as a
potential threat; the two had fought a brief border war. So it agreed to help.
The particulars were ironed out by Pakistani
visitors to Mao’s funeral, according to the account of A. Q. Khan, the nuclear
physicist who founded the uranium enrichment program of Pakistan’s bomb
project.
In 1982, China shipped weapons-grade uranium
to Pakistan. And in 1990, it opened its Lop Nur test site to Pakistan and
secretly let the country test its first nuclear bomb there, according to “The
Nuclear Express,” a book by two veterans of the American nuclear program.
The United States, upset by China’s behavior,
including its sale of missile technology across the developing world, pressed
it behind the scenes to stop and persuaded it to sign the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992.
But Beijing’s recognition of the risks of
proliferation came slowly, and the genie was already out of the bottle. In
1998, when India conducted five nuclear tests, Pakistan responded with a public
test of its own less than three weeks later.
At about the same time, Pakistan was sharing
nuclear enrichment technology with North Korea — including centrifuges, parts,
designs and fuel essential for its nuclear bombs — in exchange for Korean
missile technology and design help. Pakistan later accused Mr. Khan of acting
on his own, but he maintains that he had the government’s blessing.
By 2002, the trade was so brazen that
Pakistan sent an American-made C-130 cargo plane to North Korea to collect a
shipment of ballistic missile parts, a flight that was detected by United
States satellites.
Some analysts argue that Beijing was
complicit in the deal, either encouraging Pakistan to share nuclear technology
with North Korea or looking the other way as it happened. China allowed the
transfers to occur through Pakistan to maintain plausible deniability, they
say.
“My guess is that most Western analysts,
perhaps a bit cynically, would assume that Chinese officials were fully aware
of the nuclear trade, given the strong ties between the Pakistani and Chinese
nuclear establishments,” said Toby Dalton, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former official at the
Energy Department.
“I think it is fair to assess that North
Korea wouldn’t be where it is today without the earlier trade with Pakistan,”
he added. “But given Pyongyang’s determination to have nuclear weapons, it wouldn’t
be that far behind.”
Others say that while there is no doubt that
China helped Pakistan acquire the bomb, Beijing would not have wanted that
know-how passed on to North Korea.
“For China, assisting Pakistan’s nuclear
program has had clear strategic benefits,” said Daniel S. Markey, an expert on
Pakistan at Johns Hopkins University. “But the onward proliferation to North
Korea was almost certainly an unintended consequence not foreseen by Beijing.”
While China wanted Pakistan to counterbalance
India, it is less clear how it would have benefited from the North’s obtaining
nuclear technology. Beijing’s ties with South Korea were improving at the time,
but its relationship with the North had hit a rocky patch — again.
Blood and Betrayal
Mao is often quoted in the West as saying
that North Korea and China are “as close as lips and teeth.” But his actual
words, an ancient Chinese idiom, are better translated, “If the lips are gone,
the teeth will be cold.” He was warning that China would be in danger without
North Korea.
In 1950, Mao sent more than one million Chinese
soldiers, including his own son, into the Korean War to help the North fight
the United States. By the time the armistice was signed three years later, more
than 400,000 Chinese troops had been killed and wounded, a sacrifice in blood
that one might have expected to forge a lasting loyalty between the two
countries.
But there has always been an edge to the
relationship, bred at the start by two Communist rivalries — between Mao and
North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and between Mao and Stalin, who both saw
themselves as overlords of the new state created after World War II.
Then Kim showed who was in charge, purging a
faction of senior leaders with Soviet connections in 1955 and moving the next
year against more than a dozen members of an elite North Korean military group
with ties to Mao. Several were arrested while a handful escaped to China.
The Soviets urged Mao to join them in
retaliating against Kim. Chinese troops had not fully withdrawn from the North
yet. But Mao demurred, according to a recent article by Sergey Radchenko, a
professor of international studies at Cardiff University, citing newly
declassified documents from Russian archives.
For the most part, Mao tolerated North
Korea’s displays of disloyalty because he was afraid of losing it to the Soviet
Union, which was the North’s main economic benefactor and provided it with aid
that Mao could not match.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
though, China enjoyed more room to maneuver. In 1992, seeking trade, it
established diplomatic relations with South Korea, infuriating the North, which
was suddenly poorer and more isolated than ever.
From then on, according to Shen Zhihua, a
historian of Chinese-Korean relations, “The treaty of alliance between China
and North Korea became a piece of scrap paper.”
China now imports more goods from South Korea
than it does from any other country, while the South counts China as its
largest market for both exports and imports. One of President Xi’s first
foreign policy initiatives sought to take advantage of those ties and weaken
the South Korean alliance with the United States.
But North Korea got in the way. After the
North conducted its fourth nuclear test in early 2016, South Korea’s president
at the time, Park Geun-hye, tried to call Mr. Xi to ask for his help in
restraining Kim Jong-un.
Ms. Park’s aides were unable to arrange the
call, according to local news reports. Chinese analysts said Mr. Xi was
unwilling to accept Ms. Park’s demand for “the most severe” sanctions against
the North.
By refusing to abandon Pyongyang, Mr. Xi lost
ground in Seoul.
Ms. Park strengthened relations with
Washington and agreed to deploy a missile defense system that Beijing opposed.
‘Contingency Plans’
For more than a decade, the United States has
asked China for talks to discuss what each nation would do if North Korea
collapses — but China has resisted, worried that agreeing to do so would be a
betrayal.
Among the most pressing questions: Where are
the North’s nuclear weapons and who would secure them? How would the two
countries’ military forces avoid clashing as they raced to do so? And what
should the Korean Peninsula look like afterward?
The Pentagon has asked Beijing to discuss
such “contingency plans” since the presidency of George W. Bush, but on each
occasion, the Chinese response has been silence, according to a former United
States defense official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized
to speak on the subject.
“The Chinese are concerned about how the
North Koreans would react,” said Ralph A. Cossa, the president of the Pacific
Forum CSIS in Honolulu. “I think it stops the conversation in the room.”
In a rare departure, Chinese military
officials expressed an interest in the subject in 2006, the year the North
conducted its first nuclear test, said an American official familiar with the
conversations. But the Pentagon was suspicious that the Chinese were seeking to
learn as much as possible about the United States’ plans without revealing
their own thinking, the official said.
As tensions have climbed in recent weeks,
questions about what China would do in a crisis remain unanswered. But there is
a broad understanding that Beijing would be opposed to American forces crossing
the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea.
Global Times, a state-owned tabloid that
reflects the opinion of some segments of the party elite, published an
editorial last month warning North Korea that China would remain neutral if it
attacked the United States.
But the editorial also said that China was
prepared to stop any attempt by American and South Korean forces “to overthrow
the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean
Peninsula.”
“The common expectation,” said Yun Sun, a
scholar at the Stimson Center in Washington, “is that China is prepared to
intervene to preserve a functional North Korean government, as well as the
survival of North Korea as a country.”
American research institutes regularly
convene “tabletop exercises” about North Korea — meetings in which participants
are divided into teams representing different nations and asked to discuss how
they would respond in a simulated emergency situation.
One analyst who has led these drills said the
mutual suspicions run deep: The two teams representing China and the United
States often end up shooting at each other.
On occasion, Chinese scholars and retired
military officers agree to participate in the sessions. But Phillip C.
Saunders, the director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs
at the National Defense University, said they usually emphasized two well-worn
points:
The North Korean government is stable, and
China’s influence over North Korea is limited.
