Every time we hear news from North Korea, we hear about widespread malnutrition, in some reasons outright famine, and that the average height of NK adults is several inches below that of South Koreans. This can be read as a consequence of the failure of their economic system, or simply because when the country split, the South got all the best farming land; or both. But why do the Chinese allow it? Aren’t they an ally of NK? Which would not even exist without Chinese intervention in the Korean War. And don’t they have enough food to share? There’s no starvation in China, is there? The Soviet Union used to subsidize Cuba’s economy. Why can’t China subsidize North Korea’s?
When it comes right down to it the fault lies with NK’s government.
So they have enough for themselves while still requiring imported grains. Sounds like they have enough to worry about without needing to care whether or not some backward country kills its own people.
The Soviet Union supported Cuba in a time when they truely believed that Communism would spread worldwide and a network of International trading partners would grow. Since the West would not trade with them, they needed as many markets for their goods as possible. It was also nice to have friendly territory so near their biggest enemy.
Nobody really believes that North Korea is anything but a batshit crazy dictatorship. It’s “communist” in the sense that Charles Manson is communist. China’s support of them is vestigal and is probably maintained to keep some pride in China’s previous policies and to make China seem a little more badass in a time when they are trading frantically with the West. It also helps not to have North Korea outright mad at you, as they are batship crazy. But China harbors no illusions about the worldwide spread of communism or trading only with the few countries left that call themselves communist.
Not that they don’t ever help. They did send a lot of help when there was that big train explosion. North Korea also relies heavily on International food aid, which I’m sure a chunk of comes from China. But China has it’s own problems (people on the whole arn’t starving, but things could be better) to worry about without trying to underwrite a crazy guy bent on destroying his own country.
China’s intervention in the Korean War was less to do with support for North Korea and more to do with heading off the threat of an army from an ideologically-hostile country rampaging towards it’s industrial heartland on a route from which China had been invaded several times previously.
The Chinese-DPRK alliance is not as close as it might seem to the casual observer. While it would be easy to label China and North Korea as Communist nations, keep this in mind: China basically has adopted a market based economy (with significant vestiges of socalism), and North Korea is a megalomaniacal necrocracy. There’s really not that much common ground there.
Now, they do get along okay, but China has been balancing its relations with South Korea (which are far more lucrative than the money pit in the North) with its historical obligations to an old ally. It’s kind of like how the Bush Administration is tilting toward “New Europe” (South Korea) over “Old Europe” (DPRK) in a way.
China is also generally damn stingy when it comes to foreign aid. Blood from a stone, I suppose.
It’s a question of “won’t” rather than “can’t”, and the reason boils down to the fact that North Korea is less useful to China than Cuba was to the Soviet Union.