The China-North Korea Relationship

Also, China does not desire to utilize its leverage except for purposes consistent with its policy objectives and strategic interests, say experts. Choo writes, " After all, it is not about securing influence over North Korean affairs but is about peaceful management of the relationship with the intent to preserve the status quo of the peninsula." This CFR.org Crisis Guide offers an in-depth analysis of the dispute on the Korean peninsula.

A Difficult Relationship

Pyongyang is not an ally Beijing can count on. Kim Jong-Il's foreign policy is, like its leader, highly unpredictable. "North Korea is extremely difficult to deal with, even as an ally," according to Sneider. "This is not a warm and fuzzy relationship," he says. "North Korean officials look for reasons to defy Beijing." The relationship is further plagued by:

• Mutual distrust. North Korea jeopardized relations with China, its most important ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, through its 2006 nuclear testing. Yet distrust between the two countries predates the nuclear blast. Peter Hayes, executive director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, says it goes back in part to 1992, when China became a "bad patron" by opening up relations with South Korea without requiring Washington to do the same for the North. The test was also a way for North Korea to tell Beijing that it is not China's tributary state, as it was until the Korean peninsula fell under Japanese control in the early twentieth century.
• Japanese military spending. Pyongyang's reckless behavior has sparked increasing debate in Japan over whether it should go nuclear in the face of the North Korean threat. China has witnessed with growing wariness Japan's remilitarization in recent years and fears the DPRK test could set off an arms race in the region. The test also drives a wedge between China and South Korea, which share a softer approach to North Korea, and the United States, which supports a stronger Japanese military.
• U.S. relations. The DPRK test complicated Beijing's relations with Washington by calling into question China's diplomatic approach to North Korea. Pollack of the Naval War College says Kim conducted the nuclear test to say, "Ok, now I am on a more equal level to the United States, whether they like it or not," and the result is a "palpable sense that [Chinese] strategy has failed." But if China 's policy has disappointed, so has the United States' more severe stance and unwillingness to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea. "It's a shared failure," says Pollack.

Washington's Role

The United States has pushed North Korea to verifiably and irreversibly give up its uranium-enrichment activities before Washington will agree to bilateral talks. Experts say Washington and Beijing have very different views on the issue. "Washington believes in using pressure to influence North Korea to change its behavior, while Chinese diplomats and scholars have a much more negative view of sanctions and pressure tactics," Pinkston says. "They tend to see public measures as humiliating and counterproductive."

After the October 2006 nuclear test, Beijing convinced Pyongyang to return to the negotiating table and the Six-Party Talks resumed on the basis of its last agreement, from February 2007. But now Beijing, which until then had been the central player in the nuclear negotiations that had first started in 2003, is increasingly feeling sidelined, says CFR Director of Studies Gary Samore. According to Samore, China perceives the February agreement as a U.S. surrender to North Korean nuclear weapons. "Having complained for years that the Bush administration was demanding too much, the Chinese now say they fear Washington is secretly prepared to accept North Korea as a nuclear-weapons state," he writes.

But Christopher R. Hill, U.S. envoy to the talks, in an interview with ABC News in February 2007 said: "This whole Six-Party process has done more to bring the U.S. and China together than any other process I'm aware of." Hill said the United States is working very closely with China and South Korea and hopes that "if the North Koreans were to ever think about walking away from this, they would understand they were walking away from all their neighbors as well."

Looking Forward

"Everyone who deals with North Korea recognizes them as a very unstable actor," Sneider says. However, some experts say North Korea is acting assertively both in its relationship with China and on the larger world stage. "The North Koreans are developing a much more realist approach to their foreign policy," Pinkston says. "They're saying imbalances of power are dangerous and the United States has too much power -- so by increasing their own power they're helping to balance out world stability. It's neorealism straight out of an international relations textbook."

Despite the ongoing talks, fears of further testing still loom, and if North Korea conducts another one Sino-DPRK relations could get "dicey," says Pollack. But China will avoid moves -- economic sanctions or aggressive actions -- that would cause a sudden collapse of the regime. It no longer has the kind of deep knowledge of North Korean military personnel that it had twenty-five years ago when Beijing could have staged a coup. "It isn't as though China really has the option of overthrowing Kim Jong-Il," says Harrison.

But Asian military affairs expert Andrew Scobell writes, "No action by China should be ruled out where North Korea is concerned." According to Scobell, Beijingmight stop propping up Pyongyang and allow North Korea to fail if it believed a unified Korea under Seoul would be more favorably disposed toward Beijing. A January 2008 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the U.S. Institute of Peace, two Washington-based think tanks, says China has its own contingency plans (PDF) to dispatch troops to North Korea in case of instability. According to the report, the Chinese army could be sent into North Korea on missions to keep order if unrest triggers broader violence, including attacks on nuclear facilities in the North or South.

Beijing may find ways to cause North Korea discomfort, but Hayes describes China as "patient" and foresees Beijing undertaking long-term training of North Koreans in China to help stabilize the country. "The Chinese are thinking one hundred years ahead," he says. "China will conduct inside-out transformation of North Korea over the next twenty years." Andrei Lankov, associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, writes in Foreign Affairs that Chinais tiring of pouring aid into the inefficient North Korean economy. "The Chinese government is promoting its own style of reform in Pyongyang: economic liberalization with limited, incremental political change," he writes. But he acknowledges that China, so far, has failed and "North Korea's leaders are in no hurry to introduce any reforms."

Esther Pan and Carin Zissis contributed to this Backgrounder.