China’s Views on the Unification of the Korean Peninsula and US-China Relations

China’s Views on the Unification of the Korean Peninsula and US-China Relations

China does not offer its views of Korean unification in any detail. This partly reflects China’s continued support for a two Koreas policy. It is the only state that sustains meaningful relations with both South and North. But there are profound and growing asymmetries in China’s political and economic links with Seoul and Pyongyang. The relationship with the ROK is an ever more important component in China’s regional political, diplomatic, and economic strategies. But this has not led China to jettison its historic relationship with North Korea, though it is no longer an active alliance, even though the treaty still exists. China’s frustrations with North Korean behavior, including actions that destabilize peace and stability on the peninsula, continue to mount. Pyongyang’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles is also highly worrying to Beijing, and directly undermines Chinese political and security interests. China would clearly prefer to have a normal and more predictable relationship with North Korea, but Pyongyang’s high degree of economic dependence on China has not been reciprocated by more accommodating behavior toward Beijing. The purge and execution of Jang Song-thaek, with whom China appeared to maintain reasonably close relations, undermines China’s ties with Pyongyang even more, and Kim Jong-un appears to pay little attention to China’s advice and expectations of restraint. China therefore remains deeply conflicted and internally divided on the peninsular future in two fundamental respects: how fully to impose limits on its relationship with North Korea; and how fully to enter into discussions or active cooperation with the US and ROK to reduce the risks of a major peninsular crisis, triggered either by internal events in the North or by risk taking beyond North Korea’s borders. There are also traditional constituencies in the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army that seek to retain relations with the North, in contrast to economic and diplomatic interests that view North Korea more as a burden than an asset. But even in the latter camp limitations and strategic suspicions in the US-China relationship constrain Beijing’s willingness to cooperate fully with the US and ROK in discussing the peninsular future or in any contingency planning on the possibility of destabilizing change in Korea. These represent major tests of China’s supposed commitment to “a new model of major power relations,” which as yet remains more of a slogan and broad aspiration than a mechanism and means for lasting policy integration.