Korea's Future and the Great Powers

4. China and Korean Reunification - A Neighbor's Concerns / Robert A. Scalapino

4 China and Korean ReunificationA Neighbor's Concerns RobertA. Scalapino From the beginning of recorded history, China has figured prominently on the Korean Peninsula. Historically, Korea played two roles from a Chinese perspective. On the one hand, Korea was a tributary state into which Chinese culture flowed, and beyond that, a bridge enabling the transmission of that culture to Japan. On the other hand, Korea was a source of threat unless it could be controlled or neutralized, since it was a potential entry point for rival powers. China's recent involvement in Korea has lengthy antecedents, and will continue for the indefinite future. At the onset ofthe twentieth century, Japan established its supremacy on the Korean Peninsula by defeating first China and then Russia. This left China on the outside and, more seriously, unable to defend Manchuria against Japanese expansion. However, World War H dramatically altered this situation . In the final months of the war, Chiang Kai-shek and China's allies proclaimed the independence of Korea as one ofthe commitments to follow Japanese defeat. Yet China was not in a position to play any role in the events that immediately followed the war. The division ofKorea at the thirtyeighth parallel was a product of Soviet-American concurrence, intended to 107 J08 ROBERT A. SCALAPJNO be temporary and possible only because the Cold War had not yet commenced . Korea might have been unified at the war's close, but it could have been unified only under Soviet aegis since the United States was no closer than Okinawa and thus without capacity to occupy any part of the peninsula immediately. FROM WORLD WAR II TO THE END OF THE COLD WAR The Korean War and its Aftermath Chinese actions and policies toward the two Koreas have gone through many stages since World War 11.1 As is well known, no agreement could be reached on unification, and in 1948 two Korean states came into existence. With the communist victory in the Chinese civil war, it was inevitable that the Democratic People's Republic ofKorea, established in August 1948, would be recognized as the sole legitimate state on the Korean Peninsula by the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC). In the heyday of its adherence to socialist international solidarity, Beijing found it natural to embrace its small communist neighbor. Kim II Sung, after all, had been introduced to communism in China, having initially been affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a youth.2 PRC leaders found very quickly that solidarity can exact a high price. Beijing was not centrally involved in the planning for the Korean War, although Mao and his colleagues were informed prior to the event. It remained for the Chinese, however, to rescue Kim and his comrades from looming defeat. The motives, to be sure, were not primarily those of comradely duty. Once again, as so often in the past, China's leaders saw the unity of Korea under an anticommunist government, with American power at its side, as a serious threat. Indeed, under those circumstances, Beijing's leaders feared that the Chinese nationalists would use this corridor to reopen the civil war.> The Korean War cost Beijing heavily, with over 900,000 Chinese lives lost. It is not without reason that the Chinese subsequently referred to their relationship with the DPRK as one sealed in blood. Moreover, in the immediate postwar era, China contributed manpower and resources in the drive to rebuild North Korea, assisting in the construction of dikes, waterways, CHINA AND KOREAN REUNIFICATION 109 roads, and railways. Grants and credits for postwar rehabilitation reportedly totaled some $320 million between1954 and 1957. This was the period when "as close as lips and teeth," the term used to describe PRC-DPRK relations, had its greatest relevance in modern times. Yet even in these years there were problems. Waging a domestic struggle for political supremacy, Kim II Sung purged both the Yenan and the Soviet factions of the Korean Worker's Party in 1956 and 1957. And it was in this period thatjuche (self-reliance) became the supreme symbol of the effort to achieve maximum DPRK independence. The Rift in International Communism: North Korea Seek~ Balance between China and the Soviet Union After a few years, the international environment in the communist world changed dramatically. The cleavage between China and Russia that erupted toward the end of the 1950s and rapidly grew in...