Sanctions as Tools to Signal, Constrain, and Coerce

Is China imposing UN sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)? What effect is this imposition having on the Kim regime and the prognosis for whether sanctions will be effective? Answering these questions is neither easy nor straightforward. This essay argues that in assessing how effective China has been in imposing sanctions, the important factor is not the extent to which sanctions are implemented but rather the type of busting or compliance behaviors that China exhibits. This approach to evaluating sanctions is important for understanding how China's behavior affects the DPRK's evasion practices.

Current sanctions literature increasingly describes economic sanctions as able to do three things: (1) signal inappropriate behavior, (2) constrain a state's or group's access to particular resources, or (3) stigmatize the target state and in so doing coerce it to change its behavior.¹ In the case of North Korea, the focus has often been on the third element: whether sanctions have been effective in coercing the country to denuclearize. Specifically, sanctions have aimed to convince the DPRK "to comply with its Security Council–imposed obligations, to return to the six-party talks, and to take significant irreversible steps to carry out its undertakings pursuant to previous six-party talk agreements."² Moreover, the resolutions all state that North Korea should denuclearize and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.³

According to most sanctions literature, China's approach to implementing the UN sanctions has not been sufficiently stringent to choke off North Korea's access to goods and coerce the regime to change its behavior. In the more flamboyant assessments of China's activities, any form of sanctions busting or backsliding is assumed to be responsible for sanctions being ineffective. This essay examines China's implementation of UN sanctions against the DPRK in each of the above three usages—to signal, constrain, and coerce—and concludes that China has primarily employed sanctions as a signaling device. However, its mixed track record in imposing constraints has also undermined its ability to signal effectively. In the aftermath of the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, China's motivation to continue imposing sanctions at the same level it has demonstrated since 2017 may diminish, and there is evidence to suggest that this is already occurring in the border region between China and North Korea.⁴

Sanctions as Signals: China's Mixed Messages

On the surface, signaling can be seen as a very straightforward aspect of sanctions: states signal their disapproval of the behavior of another state or entity through the threat, authorization, and imposition of a sanctions regime. Yet the effects on the target of these signals are more difficult to measure and are therefore under-researched. This is especially problematic in the case of North Korea, where sanctions have been imposed over several rounds, and so the signals sent in the first round have a relationship to those sent in subsequent rounds.

In 2006, after North Korea's first nuclear test, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement condemning the test.⁵ This statement was notable for two reasons: first, this is a form of communication that China rarely employs; second, the language used in the statement strongly condemned Pyongyang's actions.⁶ Subsequently, China joined other UN Security Council members in imposing sanctions. This apparent unity in the Security Council and the combination of China's unilateral and multilateral approaches suggest that at this stage Beijing desired to send a clear and unambiguous signal to North Korea with the imposition of sanctions.

However, doubts about China's implementation of sanctions have re-emerged during every incident relating to North Korea. This pattern of condemning Pyongyang's actions and imposing sanctions, followed by nonexistent or weak enforcement, undermines the credibility of the signal being sent. As a result, as sanctions are enforced and extended over a period of time, signaling can be either enhanced or undermined by the practices of nonenforcement. If credible signals are not followed by enforcement, subsequent signals are undermined.

Other tells in the way that China...