Beijing ties fraying over Pyongyang
China ‘not threatened’ by arms programme
BEIJING: US President Donald Trump’s hopes for China’s help with restraining North Korea appear to have gone nowhere, with the two sides growing further apart as their approaches and concerns diverge.
China shows no sign of caving to US pressure to tighten the screws on North Korea, while the North’s recent missile tests have done little to rattle Beijing, in contrast to the anxiety sparked in Washington.
China’s bottom line continues to hold fast: No to any measures that might topple Kim Jong-un’s hardline communist regime.
“There’s been a lot of wishful thinking on the US side that China was coming around in its approach,” said John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Mr Trump seemed to think he’d found a partner on North Korea in Chinese President Xi Jinping following their April summit in Florida.
Yet, North Korea continued to test missiles and China continued to keep open, and even expand, economic channels with the North. By this week, the bloom was well and truly off the rose.
“Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!” Mr Trump tweeted on Tuesday, as if still holding out for a Hail Mary from Beijing. The next day, he seemed requited to the facts: “Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40 percent in the first quarter. So much for China working with us — but we had to give it a try.”
Where persuasion hasn’t worked, Mr Trump’s administration has turned to threats. Washington’s UN ambassador Nikki Haley warned on Wednesday that China’s trade with the US could suffer if it didn’t help following North Korea’s successful launch of its first intercontinental ballistic missile.
Ms Haley said “much of the burden of enforcing UN sanctions rests with China”, which accounts for 90% of trade with North Korea.
The US has already blacklisted one Chinese bank accused of illicit dealings with North Korea and is penalising a Chinese shipping company and two Chinese individuals accused of facilitating illegal activities by the North.
US officials say they plan to look at other Chinese entities as possible targets of socalled secondary sanctions.
Already on Monday, Mr Xi appeared to respond to the downturn in ties, warning in a phone call with Mr Trump that “some negative factors” were hurting the relationship.
Although Beijing is far from happy with the current situation, and relations between China and North Korea are getting “colder and colder”, Beijing will remain resistant to any approach to North Korea other than a multilateral one, especially one that
involves the United Nations, said Niu Jun, an expert at Peking University in Beijing.
North Korea’s missile tests aren’t seen as such a concern because China itself doesn’t feel threatened, Mr Niu said. “For China, it’s a question of regional imbalance, of contradictions between the sides.”
In keeping with that sense of threat level, China has counselled a calm approach centred on negotiations and bilateral give-and-take.
That is seen most prominently in what has become known as the “dual suspension” proposal in which North Korea would
suspend its nuclear and missile tests in return for the US and South Korea suspending large-scale military exercises that North Korea sees as rehearsal for an invasion.
That idea, which originated with North Korea, has been rejected by the US and some experts who see it as a ploy by Beijing to avoid committing itself. “It requires nothing on China’s part, so it’s easy for them to make such a proposal,” Mr Delury said.
Meanwhile, a fundamental disagreement over the utility of sanctions remains a
major obstacle to further cooperation, said Tong Zhao, an associate at the CarnegieTsinghua Center for Global Policy, a think tank in Beijing.
The US seems to believe that sanctions must be so tough as to threaten the survival of the North Korean regime and force it to end its weapons programmes.
Yet, by making Mr Kim feel even more under threat, ending the programmes might be the last thing North Korea would do, Mr Tong said.
“China still doesn’t understand the American logic,” he said.