The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HOW ITS NEIGHBORS ARE RESPONDING TO N. KOREA
Chinese leader has been unwilling to take embargo step.
BEIJING — What the Chinese call the Friendship Pipeline runs for 20 miles, crossing under the Yalu River and spanning the border between North Korea and China. For more than half a century, it has been both a symbol of the two nations’ alliance and a lifeline for the North’s economy.
Now, in response to North Korea’s latest and most powerful nuclear test, the Trump administration is expected to press China to impose an oil embargo on the North, cutting off the flow of petroleum through the pipeline and on tankers, too. The United States has called for similar measures before, and Beijing has almost always refused.
But no previous U.S. administration has pressed the case as an implicit choice between cutting off the fuel and potential military action.
That puts President Xi Jinping of China in a particularly difficult position. With an important Communist Party leadership conference next month, he will not want to look weak in the face of American pressure. But a destabilizing war on the Korean Peninsula would be even less welcome.
“Xi cannot afford to look like he is caving in under U.S. pressure,” said Zhang Baohui, a professor of international relations at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “He needs something back from the U.S. to make the Chinese cooperation less costly to its image and geopolitical interests.”
Zhang said that if Trump agreed to a version of a strategy proposed by China to ease the crisis — a freeze of the North’s nuclear program in exchange for suspending joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises — then Xi might be more amenable to an oil cutoff.
But while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have raised the possibility of a diplomatic resolution, Trump has expressed little interest in talking to the North.
“Talking is not the answer,” the president recently said on Twitter.
On Tuesday, a North Korean diplomat hinted that more nuclear or missile tests were in store, promising what he called “more gift packages” for the United States. The diplomat, Han Tae-song, said at a United Nations disarmament conference in Geneva that “pressures or sanctions will never work” on the North.
China fears that putting too much pressure on North Korea could bring down the government of its leader, Kim Jong Un, perhaps resulting in large numbers of refugees crossing into China and leaving a U.S. ally, South Korea, on its border. While Beijing often criticizes the North for its missile tests and nuclear detonations, it keeps the isolated country’s economy alive with exports of energy, mainly crude oil.
China cut off oil supplies to North Korea for three days in 2003, after the North fired a missile into waters near Japan. The Chinese government told Pyongyang that the suspension was necessary for technical reasons, diplomats in Beijing said at the time.
But that was a rare exception to China’s usual policy. While Xi has been willing to impose some minor restrictions on China’s energy supplies to North Korea, he has shown no signs of curbing the vital crude oil that keeps the North afloat.