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Prediction: U.N. Resolutions, Cheonan Sinking Won’t Change China’s Support for Kim Jong Il

What will the Chinese ask Kim Jong Il during his visit?

South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, was in China as well last week, meeting with Hu on Friday to solicit support if his country sought stronger U.N. sanctions in retaliation for the Cheonan attack.

“China wants to hear North Korea’s explanation so it can determine its position,” said Yang Moo-jin, professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

China has been taking a more active role recently in mediating North Korea’s many disputes with the international community. Beijing is thought likely to press Kim on returning to the stalled six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program. [L.A. Times, John M. Glionna and Barbara Demick]

I don’t doubt for a moment that Lee Myung Bak already has a very good idea of exactly what happened to the Cheonan, and that he has laid the case out before the Chinese in great detail. Nor do I doubt that his goal is to convince the Chinese to stay out of the way and not excuse North Korea from the consequences of what it has done.

This will require the ChiComs to leak some hints of how firmly they expressed their displeasure to some favored reporters and columnists. They may even direct its controlled press to print some “shockingly” critical commentaries (mostly, but not entirely, in their English language editions). Myopic China-watchers who obsess about subtle shifts in the tone of such things will be dazzled. But so what? It’s not as if most of the people who read those commentaries can turn around and use that information to elect members of China’s parliament. Behind these cynical and stages displays, the flow of regime-sustaining aid to Kim Jong Il won’t change a bit.

The Joongang Ilbo posits that North Korea keeps fooling China. Nonsense. China isn’t fooled at all. On the contrary: China and North Korea keep fooling the United States and South Korea. It’s becoming increasingly naive to deny that the Chinese government sees itself as our enemy, and the fact of China’s support for North Korea in the face of provocations like the sinking of the Cheonan, repeated nuclear and missile tests, and even Chinese indulgence of North Korean proliferation speak much louder than China’s protestations of good faith. It’s just as naive that we fail to shape our own policies accordingly. I can only hope that America has bought as much influence in Beijing as Beijing has bought in Washington.

We don’t just have a North Korea problem; we have a China problem. China will continue to prop up Kim Jong Il’s regime until that policy becomes linked to negative consequences for its own internal stability and foreign interests.

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  1. OFK wrote : We don’t just have a North Korea problem; we have a China problem. China will continue to ‘Kim Jong Il’s regime until that policy becomes linked to negative consequences for its own internal stability and foreign interests’

    In other words, the status quo will be with us for a long time to come, say at least another 3-5 years unless there is a brave North Korean single handedly shooting the Dear Leader into orbit.

  2. Stanton,

    It is not that the Chinese government sees itself as your enemy, it is you people who see China as your enemy. Until China becomes so-called “democratic” and obedient to US demands like 2MB is, you people will always see China as your enemy.

    So you have a China problem, I hear you. The question is what are you going to do? Bomb the hell out of Beijing? Cut off diplomatic ties?

  3. Juchechosunmanse, you are sugarcoating the acts of Beijing, including their support of the aggressor during the Korean War and their continuous support of the murderous regime up north.

    And in fact, as most of my neighbor scholars in this international institution will attest, pretty much all of East Asia has “a China problem.” Of course, it’s a problem of their own making: It is solved if they are either Chinese or do whatever China tells them to.

  6. Well, the ROK media has concluded: the DPRK definitely torpedoed the Cheonan. rgardless of the facts (which support their conclusion), the way it works here in the ROK is that once popular opinion swells into consensus, then that becomes objective reality (SEE: Mad cow disease protests from 2008).

    Don Kirk’s piece in today’s Asia Times is worth your time:

    The latest word, attributed to a government official talking to the South Korean media, is that “explosive traces” were found “in the Cheonan’s chimney [funnel] and the seabed” around the vessel’s stern, which broke off from the main portion of the vessel with most of the victims inside within a minute of the explosion. These traces “were all confirmed as those of the high explosive RDX”, said the official, as quoted by the South’s Yonhap news agency, using the acronym for “research department explosive”, described a “white crystalline solid” that’s “the most powerful high explosive and a main ingredient in plastic explosives”.

    Seoul and Washington will issue a joint response around May 20th, and the people of South Korea want action. There is much speculation that KJI went to China to get what he could before the UN tightens the noose around the DPRK’s even more, should the international body conclude that NK sunk the Cheonan.

    This is B-I-G big over here in the ROK.

  7. KCJ wrote:

    the way it works here in the ROK is that once popular opinion swells into consensus, that becomes objective reality (SEE: Mad cow disease protests from 2008).

    Objective reality within that group. I think one of the biggest distortions to come from the 2008 Mad Cow protests (led by Pyongyang sympathizers bent on ousting President Lee) represent broader South Korean opinion.

    And I’m not so sure this is true only in the ROK. How many Americans thought (or still think) that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks?

    Sadly, the tendency to be uncritical sheep is a universal norm.