The PRC-DPRK Rapprochement and China’s Dilemma in Korea

ASIAN PERSPECTIVE, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2001, pp. 247-259 Commentary THE PRC-DPRK RAPPROCHEMENT AND CHINA'S DILEMMA IN KOREA* Tom Hart Though official and academic views and prescriptions concerning North Korea can and do vary sharply, analyses of China's role and behavior on the Korean peninsula seem much more often to be in basic agreement. I shall put forth two theses in this regard, one unexceptional, the other perhaps not.1 The first is that Chinese policies with respect to the Korean peninsula are based, first and foremost, on a clear-headed, nonideological assessment of what Beijing identifies as China's basic strategic interests. Primary among these are, first, the maintenance of regional stability and peace; second, the further development of economic and developmental cooperation with South Korea; and third, the need to manage relations with North Korea so that the regime in Pyongyang can be somehow stabilized and, above all, prevented from behaving in such a way as to further alarm and antagonize the United States, for Washington's responses to North Korean provocation have been detrimental to Chinese interests. My second thesis is that China's leaders, after having recently taken steps to repair relations with North Korea—relations that had become badly damaged by dint of China's recognition of * This commentary is a slightly amended version of a paper prepared for a European-Korean Workshop "Change on the Korean Peninsula: The Relevance of Europe," Seoul, June 18-19, 2001, organized by the Korean Institute for National Unification and the Korea Cooperation Office of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung with support from the European Commission. 248 Tom Hart South Korea in 1992 and by its attempts to follow a policy of accommodation with the United States later in the decade-nevertheless find themselves caught in a dilemma. They presumably recognize that Kim Jong II and his comrades, by successfully making larger and larger parts of the outside world2 hostage to North Korea's perceived ability to unleash a disastrous war to the south as well as to the terrible human consequences of their insanely inept domestic policies, have made themselves in a perverse sense indispensable. The direct consequences of the North Korean regime's utter collapse are unpredictable and might well be cataclysmic. And since the Pyongyang power elite, as Chinese interlocutors have long insisted, is scarcely amenable to Chinese advice, not to say Chinese dictates, and since the domestic situation in North Korea is hardly improving, China's strategic goals in North Korea will be unattainable in the middle to long run-unless Kim Jong II heeds the advice that China's leaders used to give his father and opts for radical, fundamental economic reforms. The catch, however, is that since both Kim Jong II and his purported Chinese mentors understand full well that funda­ mental reform in North Korea is equivalent to jettisoning the present system and would therefore spell doom for the power elite, such reforms will not be attempted, which means that China's strategic goals will remain highly at risk. This is China's dilemma in North Korea. Evidence and Argumentation The recent opening of diplomatic relations between North Korea and a number of European Union (EU) member countries (normalization being too strong a word), as well as with the EU itself'1—an “irresistible trend" according to Pyongyang4—has attracted a good deal of attention. Far more significant and less noticed, however, has been the rapprochement (improvement in relations being too mild a term) that has come to pass between Pyongyang and Beijing during approximately the past year and a half. PRC-DPRK relations became decidedly cold following China's recognition of South Korea in 1992 and Beijing's The PRC-DPRKRapprochement and China's Dilemma in Korea 249 announcement in early 1993 (while Kim II Sung still lived) that North Korea henceforth would be required to settle its transac­ tions with China in hard currency.5 These steps were taken after Deng Xiaoping and his friends made a concerted effort in 1991 to convince their old comrade-in-arms Kim II Sung that Chinesetype reforms might be a good thing for North Korea as well. As previously, Kim totally...