North Korea is right next to China. Sure, having a crazy neighbor isn’t ideal. But the Chinese government probably figures it’s better off having the Kim regime in power than any of the alternatives. Because the likeliest alternative is a regime that ends up reuniting the country and bringing the Republic of Korea’s borders right up to China.
The Kim regime is nominally communist. There aren’t that many communist governments left. The communist regime in China doesn’t want to be seen as an outdated holdover. So it’s going to prop up its fellow communist regimes.
Defending Kim gives China credibility in diplomatic relations with other dictatorships. It’s the same thing Russia gets from supporting Assad. When Chinese diplomats approach dictators in other countries, they can show that they weren’t fair weather friends and they’ve stood by the Kims. This makes it more likely that these other dictators will be willing to align with China.
Finally, China may not really be able to do much about North Korea. The same situation happened when America attempting to negotiate indirectly with North Vietnam via Moscow and Beijing. The communist regime in Hanoi was willing to accept aid form China and the Soviet Union but wasn’t a puppet. If the Chinese or Soviets had told the North Vietnamese to do something they didn’t want to do, they would have publicly refused and exposed how weak Moscow and Beijing’s influence was. So the Soviets and Chinese concealed the fact that the North Vietnamese wouldn’t follow certain orders by making it look like it was their decision not to give those orders.
China may be in the same situation now with North Korea. They might know that if they told Kim to knock it off with the missile tests, he would defy them and continue. That would reveal that China doesn’t control North Korea. In order to avoid revealing that they can’t reign in North Korea, China says that it has chosen not to reign in North Korea.
If was as Americans paint it as all about us, we’re probably missing something. China will do what’s in its own interest. Having a semi-dependent state as a buffer against invasion from the Korean peninsula is likely desirable from their point of view. NK is a source of cheap labor and some natural resources. So Kim has a handful of nukes pointed away from China. So he has artillery aimed at the south. Why should the Chinese care? If the US wants China to do something about NK, then we need to make China see a benefit in so doing. Right now I’m not seeing what’s in it for them.
Lots of good points up-thread. Martin Hyde takes the prize but he has some competition.
As Ravenman said in post #18, there’s really two (or more) phases to this: Pre- KJU & nukes vs. post-.
IMO the Chinese now find themselves in a crack. Much as we do. They support the status quo in the status quo manner for the same reasons the US has done so since about Bush I. namely lack of confidence that any change will result in a better outcome. When every major change of direction carries with it the seeds of disaster, it’s easy to find yourself “kicking the can down the road”. That’s what we’ve mostly done and that’s what the Chinese have mostly done.
In any can-kicking exercise there comes a point where it unequivocally stops working. That point is usually not predictable in advance; the Sun just rises on the one fine day it can’t be kicked again.
All the interested parties are separately groping for what that best next move might be. XT’s point in post #19 that China is not a monolith is worth repeating. The CCP has factions, the various industrial groups have factions, and the military has factions. The in-fighting is a little (lot?) more hidden versus the fairly public spats we see in the USA between Congress, the Executive, the DoD & Wall Street. But rest assured it’s there.
My bottom line to the OP’s Q: What does China get out of supporting NK today? Reducing the likelihood of a hot war on their borders today. They, and we, both recognize we’re riding a tiger. Don’t blow the dismount.
People say their would be this mass movement of refugees from North Korea but really? NK has everything in place like good roads and infrastructure and an educated population so I really don’t think it would take much to get some industries going.
I saw a CIA report that said 25% of North Koreans are rejected from military conscription because they are mentally retarded due to malnutrition.
When you consider the consequences of malnutrition and state sponsored terrorism, I wonder if the North Korean people will be able to start growing economically after the Kim regime falls. The people there might be too sick, retarded, mentally ill, paranoid and ignorant of technology to build a working society.
Then again, China started growing rapidly not long after the great famine and the cultural revolution, so maybe its possible.
2 houses sitting right beside each other. Both built and wired the same way. One at night, is all lit up. The other, dark, because the owners are too poor to pay for electricity.
Now all the people in the dark house have to do is pay the bill and flip the switch.
That is what I see NK as. They have the infrastructure. What they need is the power.
Except they don’t have the infrastructure. It’s not a matter of just flipping on a switch, it’s a matter that they don’t have a switch that, even if the bills are paid is sufficient to do much more than it does now. Even today they have power outages and brownouts/blackouts in the capital…and that’s with the current load. They have pretty much systemic fuel shortages (to go along with the food and other shortages), and, again, that’s not just a matter of paying the bills…they don’t have the fuel infrastructure to really handle enough fuel, even if they magically got a car in every driveway tomorrow.
Fair enough. To me, the dots are pretty obviously connected, but it’s not like the various Chinese factions who support North Korea through covert or under the table means are advertising this fact such that I can conveniently pull up a cite on a web page sufficient to satisfy your skepticism. What I was trying to demonstrate with those cites is essential that XT isn’t just pulling this out of his ass…that others also think the dots are connected. And that those others aren’t like, well, Alex Jones types (necessarily). I wasn’t really trying to ‘prove’ this to someone who is skeptical, just give another take.
I wasn’t really trying to ‘prove’ this to someone who is skeptical, just give another take.