On Friday, President Lee Myung-bak will travel to China under growing pressure at home to make the case for crucial Chinese support for tough international sanctions against North Korea if, as is widely expected, the North is found responsible for the sinking of a South Korean ship. But he is unlikely to win that support, experts say, a reflection of China’s growing role in the Korean Peninsula.
Since taking office in 2008, Mr. Lee has wound down his predecessors’ “sunshine policy” of aid and engagement with the North, heightening Chinese fears of instability and driving the North into China’s economic embrace. Ultimately, that could give Beijing greater leverage in determining the fate of the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, a situation that many South Koreans would consider to be a nightmare.
“China’s influence has become so important that we can almost say that it can now claim the first and last piece of the apple on the Korean Peninsula,” said Lee Byong- chul, a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul, using a Korean saying to suggest that China can have whatever it wants.
Even conservatives, who have usually opposed aid to the North, warn of North Korea’s becoming a “Chinese colony” whenever reports circulate of Chinese companies taking over North Korean ports and mines at bargain prices.
Those fears are undoubtedly overblown, but they contain a kernel of truth, experts say.
South Korea’s concern “about China’s rising dominance over North Korea in economic terms is well founded,” said John Delury, associate director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.
“However, I think it’s the result of Lee Myung-bak’s decision to let the sunshine policy unravel,
rather than a strategic plot by China to ‘colonize’ North Korea economically.”
China, which supplies an estimated 70 percent of North Korea’s trade, is the one country that can provide the necessary economic pressure to push the isolated North to the brink of collapse — or, as Washington, Seoul and Tokyo hope, press it to agree to concessions over its nuclear weapons program.
But Beijing is always going to be wary of stronger sanctions. It fears an implosion in North Korea that could release a flood of refugees across its border or put it under pressure to intervene militarily should South Korea and the United States move into the North to seize its nuclear arsenal and build a Western-leaning, unified Korea on China’s border. Its paramount concern regarding North Korea is to preserve stability, more than to punish it for truculent behavior or persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons.
“China is more interested in maintaining the status quo and avoiding instability, and believes that more trade will help to keep things from falling apart in North Korea,” said David Straub, a North Korea specialist at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford who was formerly a senior State Department official who specialized in Northeast Asian affairs.
China juggles its diplomacy between North Korea and its adversaries, just as North Korea plays the regional powers against one another to secure a lifeline that sustains it and allows it to avoid political changes while maintaining its nuclear programs. In the past, sanctions have brought only mixed results against the North; as often as not, they have stiffened its defiance.
Jin Jingyi, a Chinese specialist on Korean affairs at Peking University, said that the sinking of the South Korean ship had highlighted the weakness of Mr. Lee’s position.
“The fact that South Korea keeps talking about international cooperation with China
and others shows that Lee Myung-bak has lost the initiative in inter-Korean
relations,” Mr. Jin said.
“China will be very cautious,” he continued. “It won’t think pressuring the North will
help solve the problem.”
China, which seeks to enhance stability and reduce economic risk in the region, would like to see better inter-Korean relations, experts say, but just the opposite hashappened under Mr. Lee.
“China would probably rather share the burden of economic engagement with the
South, but if necessary, it will hold its ground as North Korea’s sole economic outlet,”
said Mr. Delury of the Asia Society. “The resource-hungry, stability-centric, sanctions-averse
Chinese will continue filling the void left by the dismantling of inter-Korean cooperation.”
In South Korea, people remain deeply suspicious and fearful of China, which sided with the North during the Korean War. Officially, the goal of both North and South Korea is the reunification of the peninsula, but that is currently unlikely. North Korea loathes the American military presence in the South, just as South Koreans bristle at Chinese influence in the North.
China, for its part, knows that the Koreans historically have never been pliant neighbors and that North Korea is an unreliable place to invest, as demonstrated by the North’s heavy-handed threats to confiscate South Korean investors’ assets at its Diamond Mountain resort and Kaesong. China reportedly has complained to the North about its aid trains “disappearing” inside the North, apparently stolen and torn apart.
“Despite their public rhetoric about the closeness of their ties, officials in both China and North Korea each tell even American officials how much they dislike the other,”
said Mr. Straub, the North Korea specialist at Stanford. “North Korean officials have on numerous occasions suggested to American officials that it would be in the
interests of our two countries to have a strategic relationship — to counter China.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/world/asia/29korea.html?sq=kaesong&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print
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