China’s Game in Korea: Choose Your Own Reality

[Update: This new report says that the growth rate of Chinese-N. Korean trade fell last quarter, but there are varying explanations. During the first months of this year, however, South Korea’s trade with the North also showed a modest rise, but a decrease in South Korean products (including aid) going North.]

As Richardson noted earlier, there has been much recent speculation about the state of Chinese-North Korean relations, particularly since China voted for weakened but potentially significant sanctions at the U.N. Now, ABC News reports that China is fiddling with the valve that controls North Korea’s oil supply.

China has reduced shipments of crude oil to North Korea, apparently in response to Pyongyang’s missile tests, a news report said Saturday.

China, the communist North’s closest ally and key provider of oil, also has agreed with South Korea to cooperate to prevent a possible North Korean nuclear test.

South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper said China has reduced “a significant amount” of its oil supplies to Pyongyang since the July 5 missile launches.

More here. Kyodo News adds more fuel to this (pun not intended), with a report that Kim Jong Il had some uncomplimentary words for his would-be masters to the North.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has criticized the North’s traditionally close allies China and Russia as unreliable and said Pyongyang must surmount the current difficulties it faces concerning its nuclear development program on its own, according to diplomatic sources.

Kim’s skepticism toward China and Russia was expressed at an ambassadorial meeting in Pyongyang, which took place July 18-22 soon after the July 15 unanimous passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the North’s test-firing of missiles, the sources told Kyodo News.

But this UPI story claims that China has made a strategic decision to “stay friends” with North Korea, something that doesn’t seem compatible with cutting off its fuel.

In a recent high-level discussion, Chinese officials decided to maintain friendly ties with North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Il.

President Hu Jintao was one of those at the central meeting on foreign affairs work, along with top Chinese diplomats, Kyodo News Service reported.

China is North Korea’s closest ally but officials were angered by the recent missile test, which was done over Chinese objections. On the other hand, China fears that problems in North Korea could lead to an influx of refugees.

Meanwhile, the planet’s single most intrepid reporter (for the Daily NK, of course) stows away in a truck, sneaks into a warehouse, and brings back pictures of the apparently undiminished trade between China and North Korea.

One description of these reports that would plausibly harmonize them would be to say that China is bringing Kim Jong Il to heel. I’m still pretty skeptical of China’s intentions, and haven’t ever seriously considered the idea that our interests in North Korea have merged with China’s. China may be seeking more obedient protectorates, not just in the North, but in the South, too. What’s more, I question the sources of the reports of friction between China and North Korea, which consist of a Chinese state employee and Kim Jong Il himself. Finally, the Chinese have a motive to fabricate the appearance of pressuring the North, something that the American government would certainly expect in the runup to a nuclear test. That’s still true even if I agree that China’s interests would be harmed by a North Korean nuclear test, as they were harmed by the missile tests in July.

If there is anything to the dissolution of the Chinese-North Korean alliance, it would be a delectable photonegative of the concurrent dissolution of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. To be sure, this paints a tempting picture for Korean nationalists in the short-term. In the longer term, it threatens to leave Korea, in the same weakened, vulnerable, and isolated state in which it found itself just over a century ago. Koreans would do well to remember whose army occupied Korea before Japan moved in. The more things change ….