Two-Face

China still helps to preserve North Korea’s government.
By Michael Schuman

Made with a big help from Chinese friends

BEIJING – In Donald Trump’s struggles to confront the escalating threat of North Korea’s nuclear program, one factor has always loomed large: China. 

Trump believes Beijing, Pyongyang’s chief ally, could take advantage of its political and economic clout to persuade North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, to cease his threatening missile launches and curtail his nuclear ambitions. 

“China is very much the economic lifeline to North Korea so, while nothing is easy, if they want to solve the North Korean problem, they will,” he once tweeted.
China, though, insists its hands are tied. 

Trump, the Chinese claim, overestimates their ability to influence their unruly Stalinist neighbor. “The so-called ‘China responsibility theory’ is based on a poor understanding of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, as well as baseless efforts to shift responsibility for the complicated problem onto China,” went one typical comment in a Communist Party newspaper in August.
Who’s right? 

It is true that the relationship between Beijing and Pyongyang can often be more strained and tempestuous than Trump seems to believe. 

But a look at North Korea’s economic relations with the world shows that China’s leaders clearly hold leverage over Pyongyang – perhaps even the power of life and death – if they choose to use it. 

“The Chinese government is the major supporter of the DPRK,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, a specialist in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. 

“The DPRK is such a dysfunctional economy that it requires a steady stream of subsidies from abroad to prevent it from going into vapor lock.”
Eberstadt’s statistics expose how, as he puts it, China is “the only game in town” for North Korea, at least when it comes to merchandise trade. 

In 2014, the latest year of data, China bought two-thirds of all of North Korea’s exports, worth $2.6 billion, and provided almost as large a share of the country imports, at $3.9 billion. 

More critically, China’s importance to North Korea has grown significantly during the past two decades, as Pyongyang’s economic ties to the rest of the world have withered (most notably, with Russia, which had been a major patron.) 

In 1990, China accounted for less than 6 percent of North Korea’s total exports and only 13 percent of its imports.
Those figures may not tell the entire story. 

Eberstadt says the relationship between China and North Korea is so opaque that it is difficult to understand the true extent of their economic exchange. 

North Korea doesn’t release economic data, and the official statistics from the Chinese government could understate the amount of their trade. 

For instance, China is almost certainly the largest provider of oil to North Korea, but that may not be reflected in Chinese data.
China’s trade with North Korea has also helped Pyongyang dodge United Nations sanctions, imposed by the Security Council to compel Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table. 

In a September report, a U.N.-sponsored panel of experts concluded that North Korea “continued to export prohibited commodities,” which helped the regime raise much-needed funds. 

By the panel’s count, Pyongyang earned $270 million from such illegal exports over a recent period of several months. 

China figures prominently in this trade by buying silver and other restricted commodities. 

For instance, China’s imports of iron and steel from North Korea reached $37 million – more than 80 percent of Pyongyang’s total sold abroad – during that time period.
China also helps North Korea evade sanctions that are supposed to block its access to the international banking system. 

Agents of North Korea, for example, are known to register companies in Hong Kong, set up offices in China and then utilize Chinese banks to conduct foreign financial transactions.
William Newcomb, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and a former deputy coordinator of the U.S. State Department’s North Korea Working Group, believes that Beijing could and should be taking sterner action against such illicit networks. 

“China has an extraordinarily good security service. I don’t believe for a minute that they don’t know who the North Koreans are and what they’re up to and who’s working with them but we don’t see any kind of follow-up.”
The Chinese do seem in recent months to have upped their efforts on sanctions against North Korea. The U.N. report shows that China’s trade with North Korea in certain areas has declined. 

Still, there appears to be a limit to how far Beijing is willing to go. 

China fears squeezing North Korea so hard that it leads to the country’s collapse, an outcome Beijing has traditionally wished to avoid. 

“It is true that for political and geographical reasons, China is the ‘economic lifeline of North Korea,’ but such economic aid, from a Chinese perspective, is necessary to maintain the stability of North Korea so as to avoid a ‘hard landing’ or even an ‘implosion,’” one commentary in the Communist Party-run Global Times explained.

That’s a big reason why economic sanctions may not bring Pyongyang to heel. 

Earlier this month, the U.N. Security Council agreed to impose the toughest measures yet against North Korea, including a ban on its lucrative textile exports, restrictions on the ability of North Koreans to work overseas, and a prohibition on any joint ventures with the country’s companies. 

In theory, these measures will cut Pyongyang off from billions of dollars of income. 

But in the end, their effectiveness will depend on how strictly China and other countries enforce them.
“Sanctions work a lot better if China and Russia get on board and are faithful in their implementation,” says Newcomb.
Washington continues to try to prod China in that direction. 

The U.S. Treasury Department recently announced sanctions on Chinese business for aiding the Pyongyang regime, and has threatened to take further measures. 

But it isn’t clear Beijing will succumb to such pressure from Trump.
“The Chinese have been OK with North Korea’s behavior as long as it is more a problem for the U.S. than China,” says AEI’s Eberstadt. 

“The question is how far does the cost-benefit analysis have to change for the Chinese approach to North Korea to change in an appreciable manner?”

Axis of Evil

Time for maximum pressure on North Korea, even with China’s sabotage

By Josh Rogin

North Korean soldiers salute at Mansudae hill in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Sept. 9. 

The time has come for the United States to acknowledge that its policy of trying to induce North Korea’s friends to rein in Pyongyang has failed. 

The best option for stopping the mounting nuclear threat from Kim Jong Un’s regime is to muster maximum pressure without waiting for approval or cooperation from Beijing and Moscow.
As early as Monday, the U.N. Security Council could consider a new resolution put forth by the Trump administration that proposes cutting off North Korea’s energy imports, textile exports and ability to deploy workers abroad, according to a leaked draft. 

If put to a vote, that resolution will likely fail in the face of Russian and Chinese resistance.
Should that happen, there will be no more excuse for the United States not to move forward with allies Japan and South Korea with crippling sanctions aimed at the regime, its institutions and its elite supporters. 

Until now, the administration has held back as it sought to persuade and prod Beijing to use its considerable leverage to bring Kim to heel.
Once the Trump administration acknowledges that China and Russia have done all they intend to, the United States can go much further unilaterally, or with allies, to finally test whether drastic sanctions, combined with tough diplomacy, can move Kim from his defiant position.
“The amount of pressure North Korea has been put under economically is still far short of what we applied to Iran or even Iraq,” a senior administration official said. 

“There is a long way to go before North Korea is going to feel the pressure they would need to feel to change their calculus.”
But time is running out as North Korea speeds up work on its nuclear program. 

That’s why Congress and parts of the North Korea expert community are ramping up calls for the Trump administration to pivot from using only those tools approved by China and Russia.
“I’ve watched the calibrated strategy which is enunciated by the administration and it doesn’t work,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.) told me. 

“I believe we have to come in full throttle with cutting off institutions, primarily financial institutions domiciled in China.”
The Trump administration has dabbled in imposing sanctions on Chinese entities that help enable the Kim regime’s illicit activities, but it has yet to cross the line into any area that might put delicate U.S.-China coordination at risk. 

Royce urged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to put such measures into action during a briefing last week.
His committee also wrote a letter to the administration listing large Chinese entities ripe for sanctions, including the Chinese Agricultural Bank and the China Merchant Bank.

Chinese funders of North Korea’s nuclear program

“We have not had the resolve to put these sanctions on those major institutions,” said Royce. 

“It’s time to go to maximum pressure.”
There are risks in confronting large Chinese banks, which are essentially arms of the Chinese government. 

Former top Treasury Department official Adam Szubin testified to the Senate Banking Committee last week that imposing sanctions on the banks could harm the Chinese economy.
Nevertheless, he said, the United States should move forward: “The only hope we have lies in a qualitatively different and more severe level of pressure — one that threatens Kim Jong Un’s hold on power,” Szubin testified.
Cutting off hard currency to the Kim regime could undermine Kim’s fragile position with the North Korean elites and military leaders whom he needs to keep happy. 

Moreover, Kim needs hard currency to continue to develop his nuclear and missile programs, which rely heavily on smuggled components from other countries.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said last week that even if Kim doesn’t change course, crippling sanctions could slow his progress toward achieving the capability to threaten the United States.
“Do we think more sanctions are going to work on North Korea? Not necessarily,” she said at the American Enterprise Institute. 

“But what does it do? It cuts off the revenue that allows them to build ballistic missiles.”
Going after the regime’s funding proved effective in 2005, when the Bush administration sanctioned a Macau bank laundering money for the Kim family. 

That led to a series of events that brought North Korea to the negotiating table. 

Trump said recently that talking to the North Korean regime would not be productive, but his State Department is working toward direct diplomacy.
Whether the goal is to negotiate, undermine the regime’s legitimacy or simply slow its nuclear progress, moving forward without China and Russia on maximum pressure is the right move. 

It may also be the last chance to avoid a binary choice between a nuclear North Korea that can blackmail the world or war.

Axis of Evil

North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal Threatens China’s Path to Power
By JANE PERLEZ

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with Liu Yunshan, a Chinese official, at a military parade in Pyongyang in 2015. 

BEIJING — The two men stood together on the reviewing stand in the North Korean capital: a top official in China’s Communist leadership wearing a tailored business suit and a young dictator in a blue jacket buttoned to his chin.
Liu Yunshan, the visiting Chinese dignitary, and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, tried to put on a show of friendship, chatting amiably as the cameras rolled, but just as often they stood silent, staring ahead as a military parade passed before them.
Nearly two years have elapsed since that encounter, the last high-level visit between China and North Korea. 

The stretch of time is a sign of the distance between two nations with a torturous history: one a rising power seeking regional dominance, the other an unpredictable neighbor with its own ambitions.
China has made little secret of its long-term goal to replace the United States as the major power in Asia and assume what it considers its rightful position at the center of the fastest-growing, most dynamic region in the world.
But North Korea has emerged as an unexpected and persistent obstacle.

Other major hurdles litter China’s path. 

The United States, despite signs of retreat in Asia under the Trump administration, remains the dominant military power. 

And India and Japan, China’s traditional rivals in the region, have made clear that they intend to resist its gravitational pull.
Yet North Korea — an outcast of the international order that Beijing hopes to lead, but also a nuclear state because of China’s own policies — presents a particularly nettlesome challenge.
China’s path to dominance requires an American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on the United States for protection. 

But North Korea threatens to draw the United States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.
At the same time, the strategic location of the North — and its advancing nuclear capabilities — makes it dangerous for China to restrain it.
“North Korea may not be the biggest problem to China, but it does add a unique and very serious dimension to China’s task of supplanting America in East Asia,” said Hugh White, a former strategist for the Australian Defense Department. 

“That’s because it is the only East Asian power with nuclear weapons.”
Even if the United States steps back from the region, Mr. White added, “North Korea’s capability means China can never be able to dominate the region as much as its leaders today hope.”
The Trump administration has bet on China to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, shunning talks with Mr. Kim and gambling that Beijing can be persuaded to use its economic leverage over the North to rein it in.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has overseen a number of nuclear tests, defying Beijing.

A New Cold War
There is growing resentment against Mr. Kim inside China, both in the general public and the policy establishment. 

China keeps North Korea running with oil shipments and accounts for almost all its foreign trade. 

But to many Chinese, the young leader seems ungrateful.
A three-day academic seminar in Shanghai last month brought together some critics, who question North Korea’s value to Beijing as a strategic buffer against South Korea and Japan — and warn that the North could prompt them to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
“The cost is to continue to alienate Japan, enrage the United States and irritate South Korea,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University. 

“If Japan and South Korea feel forced to go for radical options like nuclear weapons, it will badly affect regional diplomacy.”
The spread of nuclear weapons, he added, would thrust China into “a new Cold War” in Asia, perhaps with a beefed-up American military presence. 

That would frustrate Beijing’s ambitions for regional supremacy while also leaving it vulnerable to being labeled an enabler of nuclear proliferation, tarnishing its international reputation.
“A balance of mutually assured destruction in Northeast Asia will not be a satisfactory situation for anyone,” said Bilahari Kausikan, a former foreign secretary for Singapore. 

“But it will not necessarily be unstable, and it may be of some small consolation to Washington, Tokyo and Seoul that the implications for Beijing are somewhat worse.”
Xi Jinping is said to be aware of such risks and to have privately expressed disdain for Mr. Kim.
But like his predecessors, he has resisted punishing sanctions that might cause North Korea’s collapse and lead to a destabilizing war on its border, a refugee crisis in China’s economically vulnerable northeast, or a unified Korean Peninsula controlled by American forces.
All these possibilities could pose as much a problem for China’s plans for ascendancy in Asia as an arms race in the region. 

And if North Korea somehow survived, it would remain on China’s border, angry and aggrieved.
From Xi’s perspective, a hostile neighbor armed with nuclear weapons may be the worst outcome.

The Chinese dictatorMao Zedong, center, meeting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, right, the prime minister of Pakistan, in Beijing in 1976. The origins of North Korea’s nuclear program can be traced to a deal that China and Pakistan reached that year.

The Pakistan Connection
China has more nuclear-armed neighbors than any country in the world: Russia, India, Pakistan and now North Korea. 

But that situation is one of its own making.
The origins of North Korea’s nuclear program can be traced to a deal in 1976 between an ailing Mao Zedong and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan.
India had tested its first nuclear bomb two years earlier, and Mr. Bhutto wanted to keep up. 

China viewed India as a potential threat; the two had fought a brief border war. 

So it agreed to help.
The particulars were ironed out by Pakistani visitors to Mao’s funeral, according to the account of A. Q. Khan, the nuclear physicist who founded the uranium enrichment program of Pakistan’s bomb project.
In 1982, China shipped weapons-grade uranium to Pakistan. 

And in 1990, it opened its Lop Nur test site to Pakistan and secretly let the country test its first nuclear bomb there, according to “The Nuclear Express,” a book by two veterans of the American nuclear program.
The United States, upset by China’s behavior, including its sale of missile technology across the developing world, pressed it behind the scenes to stop and persuaded it to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992.
But Beijing’s recognition of the risks of proliferation came slowly, and the genie was already out of the bottle. 

In 1998, when India conducted five nuclear tests, Pakistan responded with a public test of its own less than three weeks later.
At about the same time, Pakistan was sharing nuclear enrichment technology with North Korea — including centrifuges, parts, designs and fuel essential for its nuclear bombs — in exchange for Korean missile technology and design help. 

Pakistan later accused Mr. Khan of acting on his own, but he maintains that he had the government’s blessing.
By 2002, the trade was so brazen that Pakistan sent an American-made C-130 cargo plane to North Korea to collect a shipment of ballistic missile parts, a flight that was detected by United States satellites.
Beijing was complicit in the deal, encouraging Pakistan to share nuclear technology with North Korea.

China allowed the transfers to occur through Pakistan to maintain plausible deniability.
“Chinese officials were fully aware of the nuclear trade, given the strong ties between the Pakistani and Chinese nuclear establishments,” said Toby Dalton, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former official at the Energy Department.
“North Korea wouldn’t be where it is today without the earlier trade with Pakistan,” he added. 

“But given Pyongyang’s determination to have nuclear weapons, it wouldn’t be that far behind.”

While China wanted Pakistan to counterbalance India, it is less clear how it would have benefited from the North’s obtaining nuclear technology. 

A picture of Mao Zedong, right, and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, on the Hekou Broken Bridge, which connected China and North Korea before it was bombed by the United States during the Korean War.

Blood and Betrayal
Mao is often quoted in the West as saying that North Korea and China are “as close as lips and teeth.” But his actual words, an ancient Chinese idiom, are better translated, “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold.” 

He was warning that China would be in danger without North Korea.
In 1950, Mao sent more than one million Chinese soldiers, including his own son, into the Korean War to help the North fight the United States. 

By the time the armistice was signed three years later, more than 400,000 Chinese troops had been killed and wounded, a sacrifice in blood that one might have expected to forge a lasting loyalty between the two countries.
But there has always been an edge to the relationship, bred at the start by two Communist rivalries — between Mao and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and between Mao and Stalin, who both saw themselves as overlords of the new state created after World War II.
Then Kim showed who was in charge, purging a faction of senior leaders with Soviet connections in 1955 and moving the next year against more than a dozen members of an elite North Korean military group with ties to Mao. 

Several were arrested while a handful escaped to China.
The Soviets urged Mao to join them in retaliating against Kim. 

Chinese troops had not fully withdrawn from the North yet. 

But Mao demurred, according to a recent article by Sergey Radchenko, a professor of international studies at Cardiff University, citing newly declassified documents from Russian archives.
For the most part, Mao tolerated North Korea’s displays of disloyalty because he was afraid of losing it to the Soviet Union, which was the North’s main economic benefactor and provided it with aid that Mao could not match.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, China enjoyed more room to maneuver. 

In 1992, seeking trade, it established diplomatic relations with South Korea, infuriating the North, which was suddenly poorer and more isolated than ever.
From then on, according to Shen Zhihua, a historian of Chinese-Korean relations, “The treaty of alliance between China and North Korea became a piece of scrap paper.”
China now imports more goods from South Korea than it does from any other country, while the South counts China as its largest market for both exports and imports. 

One of Xi’s first foreign policy initiatives sought to take advantage of those ties and weaken the South Korean alliance with the United States.
But North Korea got in the way. 

After the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in early 2016, South Korea’s president at the time, Park Geun-hye, tried to call Xi to ask for his help in restraining Kim Jong-un.
Ms. Park’s aides were unable to arrange the call, according to local news reports. 

Chinese analysts said Xi was unwilling to accept Ms. Park’s demand for “the most severe” sanctions against the North.
By refusing to abandon Pyongyang, Xi lost ground in Seoul.
Ms. Park strengthened relations with Washington and agreed to deploy a missile defense system that Beijing opposed.

President Trump and Xi at Mar-a-Lago in April. 

For more than a decade, the United States has asked China for talks to discuss what each nation would do if North Korea collapses — but China has resisted, worried that agreeing to do so would be a betrayal.
Among the most pressing questions: 

• Where are the North’s nuclear weapons and who would secure them? 
• How would the two countries’ military forces avoid clashing as they raced to do so? 
• And what should the Korean Peninsula look like afterward?

The Pentagon has asked Beijing to discuss such “contingency plans” since the presidency of George W. Bush, but on each occasion, the Chinese response has been silence, according to a former United States defense official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.
“The Chinese are concerned about how the North Koreans would react,” said Ralph A. Cossa, the president of the Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu. 

“I think it stops the conversation in the room.”
In a rare departure, Chinese military officials expressed an interest in the subject in 2006, the year the North conducted its first nuclear test, said an American official familiar with the conversations. 

But the Pentagon was suspicious that the Chinese were seeking to learn as much as possible about the United States’ plans without revealing their own thinking, the official said.
As tensions have climbed in recent weeks, questions about what China would do in a crisis remain unanswered. 

But there is a broad understanding that Beijing would be opposed to American forces crossing the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea.
Global Times, a state-owned tabloid that reflects the opinion of some segments of the party elite, published an editorial last month warning North Korea that China would remain neutral if it attacked the United States.
But the editorial also said that China was prepared to stop any attempt by American and South Korean forces “to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula.”
“The common expectation,” said Yun Sun, a scholar at the Stimson Center in Washington, “is that China is prepared to intervene to preserve a functional North Korean government, as well as the survival of North Korea as a country.”
American research institutes regularly convene “tabletop exercises” about North Korea — meetings in which participants are divided into teams representing different nations and asked to discuss how they would respond in a simulated emergency situation.
One analyst who has led these drills said the mutual suspicions run deep: The two teams representing China and the United States often end up shooting at each other.
On occasion, Chinese scholars and retired military officers agree to participate in the sessions. 

But Phillip C. Saunders, the director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University, said they usually emphasized two well-worn points: The North Korean government is stable, and China’s influence over North Korea is limited.