Speculation about a change in Chinese policy towards North Korea seems at best premature

Speculation about a change in Chinese policy towards North Korea seems at best premature

Banyan

THE lecherous old lush is still on the cognac, even if there is sadly no news of the Swedish masseuses. That Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictator, has an abiding proclivity for the bottle has now been attested (at second hand) by a senior member of the Chinese government. But otherwise the American diplomatic cables made public in this week’s WikiLeaks deluge confirm little that was not already known about Mr Kim, or China’s relations with him. They merely add fuel to the blaze of guesswork and gossip that passes for analysis of China-North Korean relations.

Still, they contain one piece of startling, headline-grabbing conjecture: that China could live with a reunified Korea, controlled by the South. China pays lip service to the idea of Korean unification. In practice it has long seemed ready to put up with almost any misbehaviour by its ally, North Korea, to prevent its collapse and absorption by the American-allied South. Even this year it has refused to condemn the North for the sinking of a South Korean corvette, the Cheonan, in March, the revelation in November of an unknown uranium-enrichment facility, and the shelling that month of a South Korean island.

In fact the headline version of China’s alleged change of attitude to a takeover by the South distorts the analysis given in February this year by the cable’s source, Chun Yung-woo, who has since become South Korea’s national-security adviser. Mr Chun is quoted as saying merely that two senior Chinese officials were “ready to face the new reality” that North Korea no longer has much value for China as a buffer state. This view, he argued, had gained ground in China since the North’s unneighbourly test of a nuclear bomb near the Chinese border in 2006.

Other Chinese officials also express frustration and embarrassment at the alliance with North Korea. The bomb test itself had already given China reason to worry about its inept sidekick’s nuclear dabbling. It has just emerged that a deputy foreign minister, in April last year, compared Mr Kim’s behaviour to that of a “spoiled child”. His tantrums risk war. South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, faces criticism at home for not having retaliated more robustly to last month’s shelling.

Then there is the succession. In the 1980s Deng Xiaoping was said to view with distaste the dynastic installation by Kim Il Sung of his callow, hedonistic son as successor. Kim Jong Il’s promotion of the tubby, 20-something unknown, Kim Jong Un, is even more grotesque. Some Chinese bloggers rail against the aid wasted propping up this failing family business.

Yet in August China’s president, Hu Jintao, abruptly dropped plans to appear at a ceremony in Shenzhen in favour of popping up to north-eastern China to meet the Kims, apparently to give his blessing to the youngster’s anointing. And in response to the shelling China has, in a sense, backed North Korea. It has called for an emergency meeting to prepare for a resumption of six-party talks, involving America, Japan and Russia as well as China and the two Koreas. America, Japan and South Korea have balked, arguing that to resume before any concession from North Korea would in effect be to reward its aggression.

There are three possible explanations for China’s extraordinary tolerance of the Kims’ roguery. One is that it has some sympathy for the North’s claim of being the injured party. An international inquiry blaming North Korea did not lay to rest all the conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Cheonan. And North Korea had repeatedly threatened dire reprisals if military exercises in disputed waters near its shore involved live firing, as those in November did. (In joint exercises in the same area this week, American and South Korean forces cancelled live-fire artillery drills.) Even so it is hard to dispute that the North Korean response was, in the words of Shen Dingli, a Chinese scholar, “completely excessive, disproportionate and outrageous”.

A second explanation is that China’s alliance with North Korea—“as close as lips and teeth”, as the catchphrase has it—gives the Kims special licence. On a trip to Pyongyang last year Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, visited the grave of Mao Anying, a son of Mao Zedong, who died fighting as a Chinese “volunteer” in the Korean war of 1950-53.

That also seems limp. China’s leaders are not a sentimental lot, and if they cling to an alliance with the North Korean regime it must be because they believe it in China’s interests. Which leaves the suggestion that the officials Mr Chun was quoting were either out of line, telling their interlocutor what he wanted to hear or, perhaps, ahead of their time. Mr Chun himself described a generational shift in Chinese attitudes and noted that the Chinese envoy to the six-country talks on North Korea was, contrary to his hopes, not one of the enlightened sophisticates. Rather it was (and still is) Wu Dawei, an older man, whom he called China’s “most incompetent official”, and the American scribe summed up as “an arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard”. The old guard in China still seems to be running Korea policy.

Gumption and bile

Another leaked cable contains an account of a meeting last year between a senior American official and Singapore’s “minister mentor”, Lee Kuan Yew. He is reported as giving a typically no-nonsense summation of the North Koreans. They are “psychopathic types, with a flabby old chap for a leader who prances around stadiums seeking adulation”, though the next leader may not have “the gumption or the bile of his father and grandfather. He may not be prepared to see people die like flies.” The cable summarises the minister mentor’s view: though China would rather North Korea did not have nukes, it would prefer—even if Japan were also to “go nuclear” in response—a nuclear North Korea to an American presence on its own border.

The Economist

The dangers of a rising China

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