China’s Evolving Policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under Xi Jinping

Abstract

Despite international pressure to condemn North Korea (DPRK), China’s successive leaderships have dealt carefully with Pyongyang, especially vis-à-vis its nuclear weapons program. This moderate stance reflects the two countries’ decades-long relationship, summarised in the Chinese idiom that Pyongyang and Beijing are “as close as lips and teeth”. Nevertheless, the DPRK’s third nuclear test in February 2013 raised enormous challenges for the new Xi Jinping leadership to maintain the previous DPRK policy focused on the status quo and stability on the Korean Peninsula. China’s attitudes and policies towards the DPRK after the provocative third test signified a possible reorientation of Beijing’s DPRK policy. This generated repercussions in the countries concerned and prompted debates among experts. This article asks how these events should be understood and what their implications are for the Xi leadership’s policy on the DPRK, the stability of the Korean Peninsula, and Northeast Asia. Given China’s competitive relations with other major powers, we conclude that the Xi leadership will not abandon the DPRK; indeed it will reinforce the policy of strengthening China’s influence over it. Nonetheless one aspect of doing so will involve China opening up to other – cooperative, multilateral – approaches to reinforcing stability on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.

Keywords:

• Chinese foreign policy
• North Korea
• Sino-DPRK relations
• Xi Jinping leadership
• multilateral security cooperation in Northeast Asia
• regional economic integration

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2014–15. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript. Any mistakes or oversights are those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This term refers to fissile material processing (both plutonium reprocessing and HEU production), warhead manufacturing and miniaturisation, and delivery vehicle development.

2. This was foreshadowed by Kim’s 1956 purge of the pro-Chinese Yunan faction (Snyder, 2009).

3. To overcome US-led sanctions after Tiananmen, Deng re-established the reformist line and initiated diplomatic campaigns to mend China’s relations with the US and international society.

4. For example, when the DPRK withdrew from the NPT in 2003, China temporarily cut its oil supply pipeline. China did the same for three months in 2004, when the DPRK did not attend the Six-Party Talks.

5. The revised DPRK Constitution (2012) proclaims it “a nuclear power state”.

6. Similarly, throughout 2014 the DPRK embarked on a diplomatic charm offensive vis-à-vis Japan. This addressed numerous topics (from Japanese sanctions to DPRK abductions of Japanese citizens), but an important aspect was the way the DPRK provided cover for Japan’s security “normalisation” (i.e. the loosening of Article 9 constitutional prohibitions on Japanese participation in collective security, as well as an ongoing military build-up). As China is generally considered the state most threatened by this “normalisation”, one speculates whether Pyongyang has cultivated warmer relations with Japan as a tactic to warn Beijing that the DPRK is capable of stepping out from China’s shadow (in a way that hurts wider PRC security interests in Northeast Asia), and thus that the Xi leadership should deal with it more equitably.

7. That seems less likely as of 2014. Both Victor Cha and Jonathan Pollack argue in relation to the 2014 ROK-PRC Summit that China is rather trying to “win South Korea”, to loosen the bonds of the US-ROK-Japan trilateral alliance through a Sino-ROK FTA and joint anti-Japan statements (based on shared historical grievances) at summits (Cha, 2014; Pollack, 2014). President Park resisted such a joint anti-Japan statement at the 2014 summit, but during his Seoul visit Xi evoked the issue of shared Chinese and ROK disappointment with Japanese historical responsibility in a speech at Seoul National University (Pollack, 2014).

8. A ROK diplomat stated that “[w]hile Korea has been dropped from the list of founding members of the AIIB this time around, it is still in a deep dilemma on what sort of strategic choices it has to make as China challenges the US-led international order” (Korea Times, 2014b). This dilemma remains, although the ROK agreed in 2015 to join the AIIB.