Starving North Korea Looks To Reopen Trade With China

NORTH KOREA’S TRICKLE of trade across its border with China, its only significant trading partner, has been suspended for more than a year and a half, with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un concerned about importing Covid-19, which would quickly overwhelm North Korea’s rickety health system.

Now, Japan’s Nikkei news reports, preparations are being made to reopen the rail line across the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge connecting Dandong in Liaoning province and Sinuiju in North Korea to bring in shipments of food and pharmaceuticals to alleviate the chronic hunger prevalent in North Korea.

In June, Kim all but admitted food shortages for the first time. Extreme heat followed by recent flooding in the east of the country, which North Korean state media say has inundated farmland destroying crops, will only have exacerbated malnutrition.

That preparations are being made to reopen a trade corridor does not mean it will necessarily happen. The Nikkei says Kim has since April pulled back from restarting trade at the last minute several times. The same could happen again now that China is grappling with the largest virus outbreak since the first wave last year.

A quarantine facility for cargo at a military airfield close to the border was due to have been completed this month, but has run into sanitizing problems; the Nikkei quotes unnamed South Korean intelligence sources saying that this was the ‘great crisis in ensuring the security of the state and safety of the people’ that Kim mysteriously referred to in late June. It also says that Ri Pyong Chol, a former general and relative of Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, is believed to have been demoted from the Politburo standing committee as a result.

Kim may also turn to Russia for imports. The Russian Embassy in Pyongyang says its ambassador, Alexander Matsegor, agreed at a meeting with North Korea’s external economic affairs minister in Pyongyang last Tuesday to work on an accelerated resumption of trade, given the severe economic situation.

Failure to restart trade with China or Russia would leave Pyongyang with its least palatable option, reopening negotiations with Seoul and Washington for aid or sanctions relief.

Mr Xi Goes To Pyongyang

IT HAS BEEN 14 years since a Chinese leader has visited North Korea. President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Pyongyang on his first visit since assuming power will provide a welcome boost to his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un. It also comes ahead of the G20 summit in Osaka towards the end of this month, when Xi will meet US President Donald Trump.

While trade and technology will top their agenda, Xi will find it a useful bargaining chip to have the latest word from Pyongyang on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, a process in limbo since the collapse of the Hanoi summit between Kim and Trump in February.

Xi will also want to reassure himself that sanctions-hit North Korea remains potentially stable despite the tensions over denuclearization and economic deprivation. Some assistance on the latter by way of humanitarian aid and tourism (an area not yet subject to sanctions) will likely be forthcoming.

There is also much signalling going on here: from Pyongyang to Washington that North Korea still has China’s support, and from Beijing to Washington that denuclearization is not a bilateral issue and that China remains a critical player.

China Can Be Content With The Trump-Kim Singapore Summit

 

THE SINGAPORE SUMMIT between US President Donald Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un was a quick-fire and highly choreographed affair, genuinely historic in just happening, but long on symbolism and short on substance.

It may turn out to provide the basis for the eventual denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, though an equally long-term success would be the integration of North Korea into the international order as a nuclear power that played by international rules and norms.

Alternatively, it may all fall apart in time, as history provides some precedent.

But potentially it is a ‘reset moment’, although this Bystander is not alone in having no idea what Kim’s long-term game is.

For now, China will be pretty happy with where things stand. Kim has given nothing away that would concern Beijing. Meanwhile, the US president has tacitly followed the ‘suspension for suspension’ approach Beijing suggested all along once it was clear that the dormant six-party talks framework was going to be replaced by bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Trump’s statements at a post-meeting press conference that the US would suspend its joint military exercises with South Korea and that the president would like US troops to leave the peninsula eventually (neither of which proposal was in the statement the two leaders signed at their meeting) would have delighted China. Beijing has long wanted a scaled-down US military presence in the region.

So, too, would Trump’s promise of security guarantees for the North Korean regime — China wants no outcomes that lead to either the unification of the Koreas or the collapse of the Kim dynasty, either outcome of which risks putting US or US-allied troops on its Manchurian border.

It will, no doubt, take the occasion when it arises to remind Seoul that Trump considered the joint exercises, or ‘war games’ as he called them, too expensive. From there, it will not be too far a stretch to put the idea in Seoul’s mind that the US president could have been suggesting that South Korea would be too expensive to defend in general.

Senior US officials, alive to the broader security implications of that for Japan and in the South China Sea, were quick to row back on that.

Most importantly for Beijing, no detailed plan or process for managing North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes was laid out at the summit. The only commitment was to hold follow-on summit implementation negotiations, led by U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and an unnamed ‘relevant high-level [North Korean] official’.

This opens the door for all the interested parties, especially China, to turn that into an international effort for what will necessarily be a detailed and painstaking process of inspection and verification if the US aim of ‘complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation’ is to be achieved. The considerable volume of regional diplomacy that has been underway for some months is, in a sense, preparation for that.

“A good beginning is half done,” a foreign ministry spokesman, said of the summit, adding that China wished to “support the two sides to implement the consensus reached by their two leaders, promote follow-up consultations, further consolidate and expand the achievements, and make the political settlement of the peninsula issue a sustainable and irreversible process”.

In other words, it wants a seat at the table. China has a pivotal role to play in as much as it has the critical hand on dialling up or dialling down the enforcement of international sanctions on North Korea.

Pompeo will visit Beijing on Thursday when Beijing’s ‘support’ will immediately be made available.

China Is Back In The Korea Game

THIS BYSTANDER WAS was reminded this week that it was then South Korean president Park Geun-hye who was invited to the grand military parade in Tiananmen Square in 2015, not neighbouring North Korea’s still newish leader Kim Jong-un. Beijing considered North Korea an anachronistic problem state, and except for the oldest generations of Party cadres, held it in disdain.

Relations between Beijing and Pyongyang remained cold to the point that by last November, China was enforcing international sanctions against North Korea’s missile and nuclear programme with a severity never before applied. As China accounts for 90% of North Korea’s trade, that hurt.

US President Donald Trump’s bellicosity towards Kim (and vice versa) then gave cause for China to patch up its relations with North Korea. The prospect of a US military strike against North Korea threatened not one but two of China’s red lines — no regime collapse in North Korea that would send millions of refugees flooding into northern China and no US or US-aligned troops up against its borders.

When in May, Trump boldly accepted an invitation from Kim for direct talks, temporarily sidelining China from what had long been six-party discussions over the peninsula’s future, Beijing swung into action, seeing the gains in influence it had made in the region, in part as a result of the Trump administration’s broader regional disengagement, being at risk.

Kim left his country for the first time, taking his armoured train to Beijing, where President Xi Jinping accorded him full pomp and ceremony. As the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore on June 12 approaches, Kim has been back to Beijing. There were close discussions before US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Pyongyang in April and again earlier this month and North Korean delegations are in Beijing in number.

China is clearly signalling that Kim will not go into the meeting with Trump alone; he still has a powerful friend in China.

Beijing will also undoubtedly have been coaching Kim on dealing with Trump in person. Beijing is finally getting a handle on the mano-a-mano dynamics of US foreign policy under the Trump administration (learning now starting to be seen to good effect in the US-China trade dispute, too).

Beijing will also be doing what it can to ensure that any deal Trump and Kim strike is acceptable to it. It will not necessarily want to position itself as the guarantor of an agreement ensuring the security of the Kim regime in return for whatever ‘denuclearisation’ Kim and Trump agree on, but it will want any deal internationally embedded. Ideally, it would like a six-party treaty signed off at an international level and enshrined at the UN.

It is unlikely to get all that but will be satisfied by a deal that gets the Korean question sorted out, or at least contained for a generation in so far as that means stability on the peninsula. A cardinal principle of its foreign policy is not to have more than one troubled front on its borders at any time.

To that end, it has also been warming relations with Japan, primarily, and India.

Full denuclearisation is less of a priority for China than it is for the United States. The crunch question is not about dismantling the North’s nuclear weapon building capacity but whether or not there will be some capacity for North Korea to retain what is already has.

The Trump administration will try to get Kim to agree to remove as many nuclear weapons as possible as quickly as possible. However, Kim will push actively to keep some warheads.

The deal will thus likely be a thin one, with North Korea keeping some of its nuclear capacity for some time but not expanding it, and accepting international inspections for verification of compliance.

The other factor in play is sanctions, which Kim will want lifting (or at the very least for China to stop enforcing). He will, though, have to make concessions on exporting cyber terror and weapons technology.

Kim is now politically secure at home and can turn to prioritising economic development, though he has not entirely quashed domestic opposition to this.

Beijing has a strategic interest in his primary partner being China, not South Korea. Stability, not reunification (South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s objective) is what Beijing wants to see on the Korean peninsula.

There is plenty of risk to all sides in the Trump-Kim summit. Trump is unpredictable, and Kim is an unknown quantity in such a setting. However, both men have invested a lot in getting a deal — any deal. Beijing is now doing what it can to make sure it is not a bad deal but also one that would enable North Korea to be integrated into Chinese-led regional structures more efficiently.

A failure of the talks would be the least welcome outcome. In that event, Trump would most likely resume his bellicosity and resort to US military action. China and North Korea have a mutual defence pact that runs until 2021, so theoretically Beijing would have to come to Pyongyang’s aid if Washington attacked. It is highly unlikely in practice that it would.

However, it could also play into Beijing’s hands if a breakdown in talks further damaged US credibility in Asia, opening more space for Beijing’s plans for security and economic partnerships in the region. There is opportunity as well as risk for Beijing in the outcome of the Singapore summit.

Kim Jong-un’s Astute Shuttling

NORTH KOREAN LEADER Kim Jong-un’s not-so-secret three-day visit to Beijing on March 25-28 dropped two markers ahead of Kim’s proposed meeting with US President Donald Trump in May.

The first is that China remains an integral part of any political settlement on the Korean peninsula. Beijing has long advocated multilateral talks to achieve that settlement. Kim’s proposal and Trump’s acceptance of a bilateral summit initially put Beijing on the back foot. The visit restored its balance. Special representative Yang Jiechi’s talks in Seoul with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday offer further evidence.

The second marker dropped by Kim’s Beijing visit is Pyongyang’s signal to Washington that Kim does not go into the meeting with Trump alone; he still has a powerful friend in China.

The atmospherics were one of the most notable aspects of the visit beyond the fact that it happened at all. The cordiality extended by President Xi Jinping to Kim belied the fact that neither had found reason to visit the other since coming to power (2011 in Kim’s case, 2012 for Xi) and that relations between the historically close neighbours were at a low ebb not least because of China’s unprecedented imposition of international sanctions on the Pyongyang regime because of its nuclear and missile tests.

Kim played his part in this show of restored fraternity to perfection, striking a delicate balance between the deference to be expected of a ‘little brother’ while remaining his own man.

This Bystander reflects on how adept Kim’s father and grandfather were at playing off China and the former Soviet Union against each other. We wonder if that gene has passed to the latest generation as Kim shuttles between summits with Xi, Trump and Moon regardless of what his true intentions remain.

Breakthrough Or Blunder, Trump-Kim Talks Trouble China

CHINA HAS LONG held that talks are the only way to de-escalate tensions between North Korea and the United States. It now has talks — or at least the promise of them — following US President Donald Trump’s surprise acceptance of an offer to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by May for a face-to-face discussion on denuclearization.

The White House confirmed the talks, as it does, by Twitter.

Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze. Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2018

The downside of this development for Beijing is that it will not be at the table (unless by some chance it manages to host the talks), at least initially.

Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang made the right supportive noises about ‘dialogue and discussion’ in response to the announcement in Washington by the South Korean officials who had recently met Kim in Pyongyang. However, it did not escape this Bystander’s notice that he also slipped in a call to start multilateral meetings to advance the process of peacefully resolving the Korean nuclear issue, and that China would continue to make efforts on this.

Beijing will, of course, welcome the sudden prospect of diplomacy after months of belligerent invective between ‘the Dotard’ and ‘Little Rocket Man’. It will also be conscious that that diplomacy may be short-lived; it is difficult to be certain of Kim’s motives, and the history of arms control negotiations involving Pyongyang argues for caution about possible outcomes.

The previous attempt to get Pyongyang to disarm by negotiation was the Six-Party Talks involving the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and Japan that followed North Korea’s first nuclear weapons test in 2006. The deal on the table was that Pyongyang would shut down its nuclear and programme in exchange for aid and sanctions lifting. However, what could not be agreed was how to verify the North’s compliance. The talks broke down in 2008. Pyongyang resumed nuclear testing the following year, and Beijing signed on for the first time to sanctions against North Korea.

This time around, Beijing perhaps as much as Washington will be wary that Kim is again just buying time. And its red line remains no North Korean regime collapse that ends up with US or US-allied forces on its border.

The risks in bilateral talks between North Korea and the United States, should they turn out well (at this point a long shot, to our mind), is that North and South collectively end up more aligned with the United States and less with China, providing Washington leverage to use North Korea as a strategic balancing power in the region, a role that would give Kim some of the aggrandisement he craves.

The Global Times, a voicepiece on international affairs for the Party, noted that “as a major power, it is unnecessary for China to worry about North Korea ‘turning to the US’” — a comment that suggests Beijing is worried about just that.

Talks driven by Seoul, Pyongyang and Washington sideline Beijing, not a comfortable position for ‘a major power’.

Perhaps the best analogy for the latest developments is a chess match. Kim has just made an audacious move, which he will have thought through carefully. Trump has responded instinctively. We do not yet know if one or both men have played the breakthrough winning move or have blundered badly.

If Trump comes to feel he has been deceived or belittled, he will likely retaliate punitively. And that may be the worst outcome from Beijing’s perspective of a match at which, for now at least, it is on the sidelines.

For one, it would test Beijing’s commitment to implementing its 1961 Friendship treaty with the North that obliges it to intervene on Pyongyang’s side in the event of military ‘aggression’.

While we have been here before with the Six-Party Talks, what may different this time is that the North now has nuclear weapons that can reach the mainland United States. Historically, after they have acquired a nuclear arsenal, ‘rogue’ nuclear states, move onto legitimising their nuclear status and then finally to casting off the sanctions they incurred along the way.

If Kim is preparing to take the second step and Trump thinks he is stopping Kim from taking the first, where does that leave Beijing?

Arguably it still maintains the most leverage of any of the involved parties over its neighbour. But how can it use that to broker a compromise that provides the regional stability that it most desires within a multilateral framework to deliver it in which it can play a leading role when it is not in the room?

In that regard, much may turn on the personal relationship between Trump and President Xi Jinping, who again talked on the phone on Friday with Xi nudging Trump to develop bilateral talks with Kim into multilateral ones.

As we have noted before, Beijing has two sets of relationships to manage, one with Pyongyang and the other with Washington. Both have highly unpredictable players on the other side — and now both those wild cards are going to sit down together.

Song Seeks To Open Diplomatic Doors In North Korea

THE PARTY, NOT the government runs China’s relations with North Korea. As head of the Party’s international department, Song Tao (above) is about as senior as it gets in regards to dealing with Pyongyang.

His four-day visit to North Korea is purportedly to brief North Korean party officials on the outcome of the Chinese Communist Party’s recently concluded 19th Party Congress. If he does, it will be, no doubt, be to reiterate the part in General Secretary Xi Jinping’s work report that implied that China is still more than a quarter of a century from military parity with the United States, and, by extension, that if Kim Jong-un thinks he can take on the United States in a war and win, he better think again.

Beijing certainly does want any hostilities on its doorstep. Stability is its primary goal in the nuclear standoff in the Korean peninsula. Kim will not stop his nuclear missiles programme until he has the deterrent that will ensure the continuation of his regime. Washington, for its part, is determined that he will not reach that point.

The only conceivable compromise that will lower tension on the peninsula is for China and the United States to accept that North Korea will develop long-range nuclear weapons (as they have) and work to draw it into the international arrangements that prevent those weapons being used in anger.

Although there has been no mention of it in state media, Song may have met Kim on Sunday with the likely aim of ‘opening the door’ to some semblance of diplomatic exchanges involving Washington and Pyongyang. Beijing thinks the most promising avenue for those would be around a trade-off of North Korea suspending its nuclear and missile tests in return for the suspension of large-scale US-South Korean military exercises.

Song’s trip comes just a week after the Beijing leg of US President Donald Trump five-nation Asia tour. Trump pressed China to do more to rein in North Korea. China, however, does not have as much sway over Pyongyang as Washington seems to believe, though it has more than it will publicly admit.

It has, however, been tougher on sanctions against North Korea than its previous track record in this regard would have led one to expect, and it is strictly enforcing the UN-imposed sanctions on imports of coal, iron ore and seafood from North Korea as well as shutting down banking links.

What effect this is having is difficult to ascertain in any detail, although all the reports reaching us suggest that the economy is being squeezed hard. It had grown by 3.9% in 2016, partly on baseline effects caused by the previous year’s drought, partly because of higher military spending and partly because more entrepreneurial activity had been allowed.

Growth likely slowed from that last year and may be barely 1% this, renewed drought exacerbating the impact of sanctions. In July, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said it was the worst drought since 2001 and that food security would worsen, requiring cereal imports.

A North Korean bulk carrier, the Km Dae, has been making regular trips over the past few months (five since late June) from Nampho to the port of Yingkou, one of six ports ostensibly closed to North Korean shipping. Nampho is the port North Korea has in the past used to receive international food aid. What the vessel was carrying in either direction is unknown, though there are some reports that it docked at a berth in Yingkou used for the coal trade.

Another mystery is why North Korea has not conducted a missile or nuclear test for two months. During that time China has held its Party Congress and Trump has visited Asia, two events that on past experience Kim would have latched on to make some noise.

North Korea’s Double Dilemma For China

IT IS GETTING ugly on the Korean peninsula, and it was not looking all that pretty to begin with.

However exactly powerful a nuclear bomb North Korea tested over the weekend and whatever the white metallic thing was that the country’s leader Kim Jong-un was photographed posing with — and standing far too close to if it was truly a missile nose cone fitting nuclear device —  it is clear that it is too late to stop Pyongyang ‘nuclearising’.

That poses a what-to-do dilemma for US President Donald Trump, who had said that he would not let Pyongyang get this far with its missile programme. It poses an even bigger one for China, which the Western powers, at least, are blaming for not being tough enough on its ally, while from Beijing’s point of view, it is being asked to take all the risk of dealing with Pyongyang while the United States would get most of the benefit.

As this Bystander has noted before, Washington may overestimate Beijing’s sway over Pyongyang. This weekend’s nuclear test marked the third occasion on which North Korea had upstaged President Xi Jinping at a moment when he wanted to project a particular, and strong face of China to the world.

This weekend was meant to be about Xi presenting the BRICS, with China in the vanguard, as the progressive alternative to an increasingly protectionist West. He will not have appreciated Kim hogging the limelight. That Kim feels confident enough to do that to his only ally, again, implies that North Korea is no dutiful vassal state.

That is not to say that Beijing can do nothing more. It can. It remains North Korea’s primary source of oil and could choke that off, just as it has cut off other trade. It has so far resisted the United States’ pressure to impose such a sanction. It fears that doing so could cause a collapse of the regime that would send millions of refugees flooding across the border into northeastern China and, the far bigger concern, trigger a sudden regime collapse in North Korea that would leave US or US-allied troops hard against its border.

Beijing has in the past cut off oil supplies to North Korea on two occasions. Both times Pyongyang returned to the negotiating table in short order, if only for a while.

There are at least two reasons that Beijing will be reluctant to do so again. First, it does not want to be seen at home or abroad to be knuckling under US pressure. Trump has repeatedly lambasted Beijing for not doing more on sanctions (and when it did, then slapped sanctions on some Chinese companies and has subsequently threatened a trade boycott of any country that trades with North Korea, hardly the thank-you that would encourage further co-operation on this front).

Second, it still does not want to cause a sudden shock that would trigger an economic collapse in North Korea. Instead, it will take incremental back-door steps to cut back oil supplies.

There are signs of this already happening. State-owned China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) stopped shipping diesel and gasoline to North Korea in May and June. Ostensibly, this was a corporate decision made on the basis of uncertainty over getting paid. However, such as decision would not have been taken without the express consent of the Party committee within CNPC, and that consent, in turn, would not have been given without express consent and more likely direction from higher up.

Last year, China shipped more than 96,000 tonnes of gasoline and nearly 45,000 tonnes of diesel, worth a combined $64 million, to North Korea. Most of it came from CNPC, but this Bystander would hazard that more and more of China’s other energy companies will discover they have misgivings about trading with Pyongyang and slowly but steadily the oil supply will be choked off.

The statement from the foreign ministry condemning the weekend’s bomb test offers further signs of Beijing’s hardening position towards Pyongyang. While it still called for a resolution to the situation through dialogue, its language was far harsher towards North Korea than in the statements that had followed the five previous nuclear tests.

Denuclearising the peninsula is probably less of a concern for Beijing than Washington, though Beijing would be more than happy for North Korea not to have an independent nuclear deterrent, and especially if its absence bought a removal of the THAAD missile defence system from South Korea as well.

Its priority is to have as much stability on the peninsula as there can be. South Korea response to Pyongyang’s nuclear test (live-fire missile exercises), the planned deployment of a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in near waters and a Seoul-Washington agreement in principle to increase the 500-kilogramme permissible payload on South Korea missiles will all destabilise the peninsula more than stabilise it, not to mention discomfort Beijing.

In this environment, Beijing has two sets of relationships to manage, one with Pyongyang and the other with Washington. Both have highly unpredictable players on the other side. Beijing’s preferred option is to work through the United Nations to mitigate the volatility and to put the United States on the track of recognising that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions can no longer be contained, only managed.

The UN Security Council met today, and its member countries will be working on a new set of tougher sanctions expected to be presented for a vote at the beginning of next week. There is still a gulf to bridge between the Chinese and US positions. Meanwhile, China will be applying its own economic squeeze on North Korea to get Kim back to any sort of negotiating table before he provokes the United States into taking actions that will trigger the regime chaos that Beijing so fears.

China Gives North Korea The Coal’d Shoulder

OUR MAN IN Munich, where those who make their living from discussing global security were gathered of late, sends word that foreign minister Wang Yi said there that the cycle of sanctions and missile tests has to stop and North Korea and the United States should return to the negotiating table.

Whether that would be as part of a resumption of the six-party talks or a bilateral meeting was unclear, but Wang said Beijing was ready to play the role of mediator, which leaves either interpretation open.

Yet in the meantime, China is suspending all imports of coal from North Korea until the end of this year. This is as close to compliance with UN sanctions against Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme that one can get. China is North Korea’s primary export market and coal is its biggest single export.

Last week, China was believed to have turned back from Wenzhou a $1 million shipment of  North Korean coal the day after North Korea had tested an intermediate-range ballistic missile in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions banning the country from carrying out such actions.

Suspending imports is the latest tightening by China as coal exports are what Pyongyang relies on to generate cash, particularly since China stopped importing some precious metals almost a year ago and banned the sale of fuel in the opposite direction. North Korean coal exports to China rose more than 12% last year, coming in through a loophole in the UN sanctions that allows imports on which North Koreans depend for their livelihood.

The mysterious death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam by apparent poisoning, if proved to be connected to North Korea as suspected, may have also tested Beijing’s patience beyond endurance.

Beijing Struggles To Rein In Pyongyang

NORTH KOREA’S LATEST nuclear test further undermines the argument that only Beijing can rein in Pyongyang but won’t do so. China’s ability to direct Kim Jong Un is diminishing as quickly as it is losing patience with his regime.

It is not alone in that. Kim has shown himself to be undeterred by international sanctions against his rapidly progressing nuclear programme — to which the latest and harshest Beijing has signed up.

China wants stability in the region and a buffer it can rely on between it and U.S.-aligned South Korea. Kim’s hell-for-leather pursuit of nuclear arms makes the region less not more stable, and Kim feels that he can disregard China’s national security interests with impunity for as long as U.S.-China relations are tense. 

He felt sufficiently secure of his position to test fire three ballistic missiles during the G20 summit that China was hosting in Hangzhou at the start of this month, much to the fury of Beijing which was otherwise basking in playing the role of world leader and was notified of the test through back channels only a few hours in advance.

For a long time, Pyongyang’s unpredictability has been supported by Beijing as a way to keep Washington on the back foot in the region. Now that is outweighed by the risk to Beijing that a nuclear-armed North Korea would lead to a nuclear-armed South Korea and Japan, and that being the sole ally to an archaic remnant of the Cold War only undercuts China’s international standing as a modern world power.

So Beijing’s calculus is changing. Its endorsement of the tough UN sanctions passed in March following Pyongyang’s previous nuclear test was a sign of that. Beijing had been lukewarm to previous sanctions rounds, and uneven in their enforcement. Even though that was a stance to which it seemed to be returning after South Korea decided in July to deploy the United States’ THAAD anti-missile system that China sees directed more at it than North Korea, Beijing’s condemnation of the latest nuclear test was harsh. 

However, if, as seems the case, Kim is using his pursuit of making North Korea a nuclear state central to cement his dynastic legitimacy, then halting nuclearisation can only come from regime change. Sticks and carrots from China, or the international community more broadly, will not induce a change of course on Kim’s part. They have certainly not shown any sign to date that they will.

Regime change in North Korea will most likely come from economic collapse that causes elites to contest diminishing economic resources. That shows no sign of happening soon of its own accord.

China could precipitate it. North Korea is dependent on imports from China of energy and food, so Beijing has the means to act.

But engineering economic collapse is the ‘nuclear option’, so to speak. It would bring a large-scale influx of refugees into northeastern China. Beijing has contingency plans for dealing with that eventuality (they were leaked to Japanese media in 2014), just as South Korea does.

What is not known is what preparations China is making to take control of an imploded North in what would be a scramble to beat the United States and South Korea in the rush to provide humanitarian aid and security for the peninsula as a whole in the name of reunification.

South Korea does have contingency plans to move troops into the North fast. If they were to run into the Peoples’ Liberation Army forces coming in the opposite direction, North Korea could become as chaotic as the Middle East, especially if remnants of Kim’s regime undertake guerrilla warfare, or China was to afford political protection to them.

In the meantime, Beijing is becoming as stymied as Washington in dealing with Pyongyang, and left scratching its head for a way to remove the Kim dynasty that throws the North into neither chaos nor the hands of the South. That it is saying publicly that it is the responsibility of the United States not itself to solve the problem, is a sign of how far from a Plan B it is.