The conventional wisdom on the relationship between China and North Korea, held to by foreign policy analysts on the left and the right, is that China has the power to rein in North Korean excess but refuses to do anything that would destabilize the North for fear of a failed state on their border. Here is how Judith Miller and William Tobey summarize the situation in City Journal:
North Korea is not a viable state without Chinese support. Beijing has leverage to thwart Pyongyang’s nuclear program, but to date it has refused to do so, fearing political instability and refugee flows. Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, notes that China has been unwilling even to implement existing sanctions against North Korea. Under UN sanctions, for example, member states are not supposed to send luxury goods to North Korea; but not only has Beijing never formally submitted or publicly released a list of luxury goods it will refuse to send, he says, its exports to North Korea of items that appear on other countries’ luxury-goods lists have increased since 2007. Moreover, he notes, for months China prevented the committee of experts charged with implementing UN sanctions from reporting to the Security Council. If anything, the planned dynastic succession in North Korea—in which Kim Jong-il would pass power over to his son, Kim Jong-un—has made China even more reluctant to pressure North Korea over its nuclear activities.
The United States could help China take the hard steps needed to halt and reverse North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programs. First, we should insist that there be no more nuclear blackmail payments made to Pyongyang. Second, we must persuade China that North Korea’s actions are antithetical to its security interests because they increase the need for American forces in the region, push South Korea and Japan closer to Washington, and encourage them to expand their current missile-defense systems. China holds a powerful sword over North Korea’s head: it can withdraw its apparent approval of the regime’s dynastic succession plan.
I wonder if this is an accurate read on the situation. It makes a few assumptions. First, it assumes that, primarily because of China's dependence on its trade with us, that China values stability in its neighborhood more highly than it values the ability to discomfort and diminish the influence of South Korea, Japan, (important economic competitors) and the United States, its primary military competitor. It is a truism that China highly values stability and is terrified of internal chaos, but it may well be that the events on the Korean peninsula simultaneously increase the power and stability of the North while decreasing the power and stability of the South. They could well see this as a win-win for them. In fact, short of a nuclear exchange, the Chinese may not be at all motivated to rein in their clients (protégés) in the North.
Second, the Chinese leadership has a long pedigree of valuing their own power and position far above any concerns about the well being of their subjects. They need to maintain a growing economy not because they care about the average Chinese individual but because they can read the tea leaves and understand that a stall in their economic growth would risk their power. They certainly do not care about the well being of the average Japanese or Korean, including the well being of the North Korean slaves.
[I do believe that as the next generations of Chinese leaders come of age there will be a significant and growing cohort who explicitly believe in helping their countrymen advance toward greater economic and civic freedom; I think this is inevitable if China is to become a true great power, but we may still be one or two generations away from a Chinese leader who has to win the hearts and minds of his citizens, née subjects.]
It is also possible that the Chinese leadership, with its own collection of professionally paranoid and nationalistic cadres, find a North Korean nuclear program to their liking. The North Koreans threaten Chinese competitors (perhaps still thought of as enemies in many precincts) and supply weapons expertise to others who explicitly threaten the interests of their number one rival/competitor/enemy, the United States.
At the moment, it is not clear the China will inevitably evolve into either a friend, a more neutral colleague (in managing a stable planetary equilibrium), a friendly or aggressive competitor, or an overt enemy. The future of Chinese-American relations is highly path dependent and decisions made now will reverberate.
Finally, the conventional wisdom that China has as much of a stake in a healthy United States as we do in a healthy China may also be open to question. It is true that China has an immense store of American dollars but that raises two questions:
If China thinks we are too eagerly devaluing our currency (which we are) and threatening their well being by doing so, their interest in our well being will diminish in kind. China would like nothing better than to supplant the United States as the world's hegemon. We have a President who is committed to assisting a shift away from a system based on American hegemony and our country has mismanaged its finances to such a degree as to make such a shift more likely. Further, if China is playing a zero-sum game, which is at least a good possibility if not a probability, than the threat of war between the North Koreans and the South Koreans, which would inevitably pull in America and cost us blood and treasure that would dwarf Iraq and Afghanistan, would not be a worst case scenario for them while it would certainly be a worst case scenario for us. Were a war to break out and the United States went ahead and massively retaliated, reducing North Korea to a rubble filled country filled with starving people (which is not a bad description of current reality), this would not be a disaster for China if it cost the United States enough to accelerate our decline. Why would anyone think that in the aftermath of such a disaster the Chinese would be bothered by allowing the North Koreans to starve to death more quickly? They are already tolerating the starvation of millions now.
I suspect that there are Chinese war games that have demonstrated that a war between North Korea and the United States, which eventuated in the destruction of one or two American carrier groups and perhaps some missile attacks on the West Coast, at the price of the complete destruction of North Korea*, would be an exchange that redounded to the advantage of China. Following such an exchange, a Chinese take over of Taiwan would be trivial and Chinese hegemony in the Pacific would be assured.
Just to be clear, I do not think the current Chinese leadership is eager for a real war to break out on its borders but I also don't see any evidence that they are terribly discomfited by North Korean aggression, especially when our response has been to avoid responding on every prior occasion.
In all of this I must caution that I am not an expert and have no particular knowledge of North Korean military capabilities or planning, but I do think these speculations are worth considering and would be curious as to how those who defend the conventional wisdom would respond.
*A North Korean attack on the American military that fell short of major death and destruction would not trigger an overwhelming response, especially with our current administration in place. Anything short of the destruction of one of our carrier groups would be met with a "proportional" response. The loss of a carrier group, which would trigger a massive response, would be a game changer for American power and influence.
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