China and North Korea

Strategic and Policy Perspectives from a Changing China

C. Freeman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349687374, 9781137455659
• eBook ISBN: 9781137455666
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At a time when Chinese policy makers appear to be rethinking China's historically close alliance relationship with North Korea, this volume gathers a diverse collection of original essays by some of China's leading experts on North Korea and China's North Korea policy.

C H A P T E R 1

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Introduction: Continuity and Change in Chinese Expert Views of North Korea

Carla P. Freeman

Rising concerns about the threats North Korea poses to international security have made Beijing’s relations with Pyongyang an increasingly important focal point for the international community, which has high hopes that Chinese influence will bring an end to Pyongyang’s provocations and pursuit of nuclear weapons. As Pyongyang has continued to conduct international affairs in ways that, more often than not, defy Beijing’s expectations and preferences, there is evidence that the Chinese leadership has been engaged in a “rethink” on its policy toward its intractable ally.¹ While it is not yet clear to what extent or how Chinese policy toward North Korea could be reoriented, the community of Chinese academics and other experts weighing in on North Korea’s behavior and the China-North Korea relationship has been growing. Many of these experts and their perspectives are not well known outside China. While there are more non-Chinese analysts who regularly read Chinese writings on international affairs than ever before, this group is still too small to adequately circulate Chinese experts’ views into the wider international dialogue on North Korean security. At a time when a better understanding of what China’s North Korea watchers think could be especially helpful to insights into the thinking and the debates underlying Chinese policy, this book’s 15 chapters present an introduction to an English language readership to some of their views. In addition to illustrating the plurality of perspectives advanced by Chinese experts on North Korea and an international relationship that is China’s closest as well as its most difficult, the volume’s contributions should also be seen as windows on the contours of China’s particular political and intellectual environment.

Indeed, behind the familiar “lips and teeth” trope used to characterize Chinese ties to North Korea lies the reality of a relationship between two neighbors that has never been easy. In 1950, China found itself going to war across the Yalu—less than a year after its own communist government had established control over the Chinese mainland. Yet, even a shared history of fighting—first the Japanese and then American-led forces—side-by-side could not prevent violent clashes from erupting between the two neighbors. In 1958, Mao Zedong withdrew the last Chinese troops from North Korea amid a disagreement with Kim Il-sung over Kim’s violent purge of challengers to his political control (including leading figures from the “Yan’an faction” who had close ties to China), as well as his Juche ideological vision of self-reliance. Even after China and North Korea signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance in 1961, as tensions rose between Beijing and Moscow, Kim Il-sung’s unwillingness to take Mao’s side over Khrushchev’s gave rise to new frictions between China and North Korea. By the late 1960s, these had erupted into military skirmishes over a border disputed by the two countries in the Mount Baektu (Changbaishan) region. After the rift between China and the Soviet Union became the Sino-Soviet split, Pyongyang preserved relationships with both Beijing and Moscow, successfully playing off its estranged patrons to extract material benefits from both.

Developments of the past two decades, including the end of the Cold War, China’s recognition of the Republic of Korea, and the death of Kim Il-sung and subsequent succession of his son, Kim Jong-il, have continued to test China’s relationship with North Korea. These developments have unfolded, moreover, amid a widening political and economic divide between China and North Korea. Beijing’s reform and opening policies have integrated China into the world economy as an economic powerhouse, while Pyongyang has held fast to its military first policy and efforts at economic autarky. More recent actions by North Korea, including its succession of nuclear tests, the Cheonan incident, and a second father-to-son succession in 2012 by Kim Jong-un to the North Korean leadership, have only further complicated and challenged the resilience of Beijing’s loyalty to Pyongyang. In addition, China’s expanding international influence and the international community’s attendant expectations that it will exercise greater global leadership means that its relationship to North Korea, and the role it plays in ending Pyongyang’s nuclear program, have implications for its international prestige.

Yet, despite the historical challenges posed by Pyongyang, Chinese authorities have carefully managed discourse in China about North Korea, treating Beijing’s North Korea policy as sacrosanct. Only in the last several years has the Chinese government permitted its citizens to express in the media and blogosphere something other than “sealed in blood” solidarity with North Korea. Netizens have vented frustration and anger toward many North Korean actions. Pyongyang’s nuclear tests, seen as irresponsible and threatening to the health of Chinese citizens, and the abduction and mistreatment by the North Korean navy of Chinese fishermen have drawn particular ire from the Chinese public. Online criticism of North Korea by Chinese citizens has also extended to the Chinese government, with some netizens characterizing Beijing’s response to Pyongyang’s provocations as weak and ineffectual in the face of the defiant and risky behavior of a junior actor in the region.²

The rise in academic writing in China on North Korea and China’s North Korea policy has paralleled the growing commentary from the general public. However, China’s elite observers appear to have to tread more carefully in expressing what authorities could consider politically tendentious views. In 2004, after the widely read journal Strategy and Management (Zhanlue yu Guanli) published an article arguing that China’s national interests might not align with those of North Korea, it was shut down.³ Nearly a decade later, the deputy editor of Study Times (Xueshi Shibao), Deng Yuwen, published an editorial in the Financial Times advocating that China “should consider abandoning North Korea.” Deng argued that Beijing should focus its efforts on reunification on the peninsula, which “would help undermine the strategic alliance between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul; ease the geopolitical pressure on China from northeast Asia; and be helpful to the resolution of the Taiwan question.”⁴ The editorial cost Deng his job.⁵ If these examples illustrate that North Korea remains a sensitive topic in China, however, a relative surge in new writing by Chinese scholars from a range of disciplines and perspectives also indicates that the door has opened wide enough to allow for the expression of far more varied elite opinions. From very few publications on North Korean topics in academic journals, in the past five years, articles on North Korea and on Beijing’s bilateral and security relationship with Pyongyang have seen double-digit percentage increases across a broad spectrum of China-based academic publications.⁶

One likely factor in the rise in the quantity of published analysis by Chinese experts on North Korean issues relates to a point introduced above. The increased tolerance of Chinese authorities toward public commentary on North Korea’s behavior parallels an evident shift in Beijing’s approach to managing its relationship with Pyongyang following North Korea’s 2009 nuclear test. For much of the China-North Korea relationship, Beijing conducted its bilateral interactions with Pyongyang largely through exchanges of senior military officials and party-to-party ties. The latter are managed on the Chinese side by the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or Zhonglianbu. In addition to Wang Jiarui, director of the Zhonglianbu, top Chinese officials involved in the Sino-North Korean relationship even on the state side of China’s government structure, such as former state councilor Dai Bingguo,⁷ and Chinese ambassador to Pyongyang Liu Hongcai, had considerable experience within the ranks of the Zhonglianbu.⁸

Beginning in 2009, however, Beijing’s interactions with Pyongyang also began to involve a growing number of actors from the government or state side of China’s political system, with China conducting its relations with North Korea through more “normal” diplomatic channels. Months after Pyongyang conducted its second nuclear test, for example, former premier Wen Jiabao traveled to Pyongyang, marking the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of formal diplomatic ties between China and North Korea—the first visit by a Chinese premier to North Korea since Li Peng traveled there in 1991. (Among the objectives of Wen’s visit was securing North Korea’s promise to return to the Six-party talks.) Beijing’s stepped-up efforts to get Pyongyang back to the Six-party talks following Pyongyang’s third nuclear test in 2013 have made MOFA’s special representative for Korean peninsula affairs Wu Dawei a key point of contact between Pyongyang and Beijing. Wu is a career diplomat and former ambassador to South Korea and Japan, as well as the former chair of the Six-party talks.⁹ China’s MOFA has also been involved in arranging visits by North Korean officials to Beijing, such as the visit of senior North Korean officials to Beijing for a MOFA-organized public event.¹⁰ The implementation of measures required by the passage of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2094 in response to North Korea’s 2013 nuclear test, moreover, has necessitated the involvement of a broader swath of Chinese state ministries and bureaus, including the Ministries of Transportation and Public Security, Customs Administration, and People’s Bank of China. Export controls require actions by China’s Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, General Administration of Customs, and Atomic Energy Authority.¹¹ Thus, while party-to-party ties remain a key dimension of the China–North Korean relationship, as China’s reputational as well as international security stakes have risen, especially in resolving the nuclear issue, the number of state actors involved in its engagement with North Korea has also grown.

Both the nuclear issue itself and the broadening of the number of policy actors within the Chinese political system involved in managing the North Korea relationship may be factors in the expansion of scholarship on North Korea-related policy topics in China in recent years. As China’s global interests have enlarged, as scholar Ren Xiao has described, “There has been a rising demand from government for information, knowledge, and analysis.”¹² Concomitantly, the academic community has been encouraged by China’s government to contribute to this demand. While an adequate discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this essay, in the foreign policy arena, as Ren and others point out,¹³ almost every university and relevant research institution has sought to contribute to the foreign policy process in various ways. They may provide policy briefs, targeting those policy makers within the Chinese policy apparatus with influence; participate in MOFA’s foreign policy advisory committee and government- commissioned foreign policy studies; engage in “public diplomacy” efforts; consult on specific issues, such as responses to crises with government officials; and also take part in the Central Conference Relating to Work on Foreign Affairs, chaired over by China’s president.

Determining which specific research institutes and scholars have more or less influence on particular issues within China’s intransparent policy process is virtually impossible. The advisory role of experts in the think tanks directly affiliated with government agencies—such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the State Council, the China Institute for International Studies (CIIS), which provides research and analysis to MOFA, and the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), which serves the Ministry of State Security—is well known. However, weighing the impact of analysis from experts based in many other research institutions or universities is more difficult. What is clear is that Chinese authorities solicit advice from a broad array of experts. They may consult researchers based in major universities and think tanks, but they also seek the views of scholars in research institutes located in provinces with international borders, when the neighboring country is the policy focus. Researchers in border provinces often have a unique depth of expertise on the countries with which their provinces routinely interact. In the case of North Korea, those based in universities and research institutes in provinces along the North Korea border, have a perspective on the bilateral relationship that generally takes into account local provincial interests and may even reflect a shared identity born of an interconnected history, common ethnic Korean identity, or views informed by frequent interactions with North Korean counterparts. This is an outlook on North Korea and the China-North Korean relationship that is a far cry from the high-level security concerns that preoccupy some scholars in Beijing. As will be described in greater detail below, the contributors to this volume represent not only academic institutions and think tanks in Beijing—including CASS and CIIS—but also universities and think tanks in provinces bordering on North Korea.¹⁴

After North Korea’s third nuclear test in 2013, debate among Chinese scholars over China’s relations with North Korea noticeably intensified. While the question of how the internal policy debate was framed is unclear, within the expert community, the two sides of the debate included advocates of a significant reassessment by China of its relationship with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), on one side; on the other side were those who argued that Beijing should preserve, and even strengthen, its alliance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Continuity and Change in Chinese Expert Views of North Korea
• Part I   New Perspectives on China’s Relations with North Korea and Regional Security
• Part II   China-North Korea Relations in Historical Perspective
• Part III   The Many Facets of China’s Relations with North Korea
• Notes on Contributors
• Index