Chinese-North Korean relationship strained

Dependency beneficial despite mutual discord

BEIJING — At first glance, it seems the perfect solution to the world’s most dangerous standoff: Find a way to get China to use its influence to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear bombs.

The countries, after all, share a long, porous border, several millennia of history and deep ideological roots. Tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of Chinese soldiers, including Mao Zedong’s son, died to save North Korea from obliteration during the Korean War, and China is Pyongyang’s economic lifeline, responsible for most of its trade and oil.

The notion of Chinese power over the North — that the countries are as “close as lips and teeth,” according to a cliche recorded in the third century — is so tantalizing that Donald Trump has spent a good part of his young presidency playing it up.

The reality, however, is that the complicated, often exasperating, relationship is less about friendship or political bonds than a deep and mutually uneasy dependency. Nominally allies, the neighbors operate in a near constant state of tension, a mix of ancient distrust and dislike and the grating knowledge that they are inextricably tangled up with each other, however much they might chafe against it.

This matters because if China is not the solution to the nuclear crisis, then outsiders long sold on the idea must recalibrate their efforts as North Korea approaches a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, something the CIA chief this week estimated as only a matter of months away.

“The North Koreans have always driven China crazy,” says John Delury, an expert on both countries at Seoul’s Yonsei University, “and, for their part, the North Koreans have always felt betrayed by China. But both sides need each other in elemental ways.”

As China rises as an economic, military and diplomatic heavyweight whose reach extends from the Americas to Asia, many here resent being dragged down by an impoverished, stubborn, Third World dictatorship that allows its people to go hungry while its leader lives in luxury and expands a nuclear arsenal that could lead to war with Washington.

“It is true that China loathes North Korea and vice versa — at the societal level, the leadership level and the governmental level,” Van Jackson, a North Korea specialist and lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, wrote earlier this year. “But China’s ‘emotions’ toward North Korea don’t drive its policy.”

Beijing has also argued that it has less power over North Korea than people think. Some observers question whether China could force a change in the North, short of military intervention, even if it wanted to.

Emily Wang The Associated Press Visitors on Sept. 9 walk across the Yalu River Broken Bridge, right, next to the Friendship Bridge connecting China and North Korea in Dandong.