China and North Korea: a view from the Sydney Morning Herald

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(...)Potentially critical is the growing and obvious estrangement of China
which once expended a huge number of lives to preserve its ideological
comrades in the Korean War and which has provided a lifeline of fuel and
grain since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jolted out of its complacent
belief that Kim's nuclear threats were bluff, China cut off its oil pipeline
into North Korea for three days at the end of February. Later it even got
its own military to study a pre-emptive strike into North Korea to head off
a devastating war.

China once saw North Korea as a strategic buffer and a compatible communist
economy. Now it is a high political and military risk for a minuscule
economic reward. By contrast, there is growing warmth between China and
South Korea. Two-way trade has hit $US44 billion ($66.8 billion) and South
Korean firms have poured $US30 billion of investment into China. Greater
China (including Hong Kong) recently outstripped the US as Seoul's biggest
export market. Despite persistent political coolness over Tokyo's perceived
reluctance to repent its wartime record in China, there is a similar
explosion of trade between Japan and China, with China having just become
Japan's biggest source of imports, supplanting the US.

By removing the last Cold War barriers in East Asia and seeing North Korea
bedded down under Seoul, China could enjoy an even more sweeping economic
integration in the region, drawing in the industrial might of greater China,
Korea and Japan as well as the resource-rich Russian Far East. Chinese
analysts feel increasingly comfortable that a North Korean collapse would
not mean US troops appearing across the Yalu and Tumen river borders. Korean
nationalism, evident in pressure to get US troops out of their more
conspicuous bases in central Seoul, would see to that. Indeed, the passing
of the North Korean regime could undercut the US foothold in East Asia, not
just in Korea but in Japan where the US maintains powerful forces ready to
mount a counterattack on the peninsula. Many Japanese would judge it time to
remove the last vestiges of the postwar occupation. Maybe it's the US which
most needs Kim Jong-il.

The problem is how to get from here to there without provoking a war. The
result may be less rosy for China. Having been so brutally occupied and
split for the past 100 years, would Koreans trust the benevolence of their
two big neighbours. Some South Korean radicals take a perverse pride in Kim
Jong-il's bombs as "our Korean-made bombs". Seoul also has a range of
nuclear facilities at Taegu and an advanced laser laboratory that give it
the capability of making hydrogen-bombs very quickly. Would Korea stay
nuclear-free? And would Article 9 of Japan's postwar constitution - the
article that renounces war - disappear at the same time as the US forces?
Tokyo's brand of neo-cons thinks Japan needs more muscle, if not nuclear
then at least an array of highly capable conventional forces that could
throw some weight around if necessary.

Despite the risks of change, preserving the status quo may not be an option
much longer for China any more than it is for Kim Jong-il. The challenge for
China is how to engineer change while integrating North Korea with its
region. (...)

Complete article:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061529330951.html