When the Toddler Throws His Food on the Floor — Dealing with North Korea: Could China Help? Would China Help?

For decades, the global community of diplomats have struggled to find ways to have meaningful conversations with the government of North Korea — the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK.

Most analyses of the situation see China as a major factor in dealing with the dynasty ruled successively by Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, and Kim Jong-Un. This three-generation dictatorship has good relations with no nation on earth, but its relations with China are its least bad relations. Exasperated diplomats around the world have sometimes turned to China for help in making any progress with North Korea in discussions.

In 1994, when the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) learned that the DPRK was accelerating its program to develop both nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them, it produced a report exploring possible scenarios. How would China react if the United Nations enacted trade restrictions on North Korea as a consequence of the DPRK’s stockpiling atomic bombs? Robert Wampler explains the DIA’s assessment of such a scenario:

In the event of efforts to impose economic sanctions, DIA analysts believed that China would protect its economic interests (such as maintaining Most Favored Nation status with the United States) by abstaining from any U.N. vote. Beijing would further likely work to ease the impact of any sanctions by facilitating the supply of needed goods to North Korea with the primary goal of preventing the country’s economic collapse, which would threaten a political crisis on China’s border.

The DIA explored another, even more serious, scenario. What might China do if there were full-scale armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula? Robert Wampler writes:

Military actions raised a whole new set of concerns for Beijing. DIA analysis divided military contingencies into two main categories: war as the result of North Korean attack, and war resulting from a U.S./U.N. attack on the North. If Pyongyang attacked South Korea, China would likely avoid giving military support and would work to end hostilities. But, if U.S. and South Korean forces pushed into North Korea, it would face a dilemma. In a worst-case scenario, the report suggests that Beijing might deploy Chinese forces across the Yalu River to prevent the whole country from being overrun by the Americans and their allies.

In the decade following the writing of this DIA report, diplomatic thinking shifted. Could China function as part of a team — as one of several nations who jointly worked to nudge the DPRK toward a more peaceful path?

North Korea had half-heartedly engaged in some discussions with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and had at one point turned off a nuclear reactor by early 2002 to comply with an IAEA guideline.

Officials in the U.S. government had adopted a metaphor for the behavior of the DPRK’s dictator. They said that Kim Jong-il was prone to throwing his food on the floor, an image comparing the ruler to a badly behaved toddler. Like a three-year-old child, the tyrant would from time to time knock over some international understanding, simply to make a mess.

Maybe China could calm the toddler down?

It was certainly a long shot: China is fiercely independent, and rarely cooperates with any nation or any global effort. But if a mutual interest could be found, i.e., if there were some motive for China to desire what the other nations desire, then perhaps China could be lured into being part of a global effort to persuade North Korea to back away from its buildup of atomic weapons.

Condoleezza Rice, who was National Security Advisor at the time, recalls a conversation in November 2002 among a group of people who were on their way to a meeting. In that group was President George Bush. Rice remembers Bush presenting the idea that China should be a part of a multinational effort to urge the DPRK away from its nuclear weapons program. She writes:

Before we went down to the Situation Room, however, he told me that he had come to the conclusion that nothing would work without getting China on board. That was clearly right, but at the time, we didn’t have a way to enlist the Chinese, and the point just hung in the air. By the end of 2002 the North had blown up any chance for negotiation by announcing in a letter to the IAEA that it was restarting its reactor. The North further declared that its nuclear facilities were not subject to any agreement with the IAEA and were instead a matter between North Korea and the United States. Kim Jong-il had just thrown a big wad of food on the floor. For the time being, we made no effort to pick it up.

Bush’s idea was to make China part of a group process. Up to that point, there had been a series of one-on-one negotiations between the United States and North Korea, with China being considered as a variable in those discussions. Bush proposed to make China a part of the conversation, instead of merely a factor to be considered in the negotiations.

By 2003, the time had come to implement Bush’s strategy. A previously negotiated deal, called the “Agreed Framework,” was clearly ineffective. A new approach was needed. Rather than let the DPRK have one-on-one talks with each of the nations, the new procedure would be to have a group of nations present at the conference table together simultaneously to engage North Korea. Condoleezza Rice explains:

We’d been trying for some time to get the Chinese to play a more active role in reining in the North Korean nuclear program. The President had been right that only Beijing had enough leverage to convince Kim Jong-il to abandon his aggressive stance toward the international community. Much of the problem with the Agreed Framework was that it had left the United States negotiating bilaterally with the North Koreans, allowing Pyongyang to play the South Koreans, the Europeans, and the Chinese off of us by seeking concessions from each party individually.

Now the task was to get the Chinese to buy into Bush’s idea. Secretary of State Colin Powell had presented it already once to the Chinese, who weren’t interested.

President Bush creatively guided a phone conversation with Chinese leader Ziang Jemin (also spelled Jiang Zemin) and got the Chinese willing to participate in the multilateral negotiations, as Condoleezza Rice reports:

Now we had a different idea. Rather than the bilateral negotiations with the North that were being urged on us by our allies, we proposed a six-party framework with China in the chair. Beijing had initially resisted the idea when Colin proposed it in March 2003. President Bush had been so frustrated with the Chinese that he’d raised the ante in a phone call with Chinese President Ziang Jemin. Before getting on the call, he had asked what more he could say to move Beijing. I suggested that he raise the specter, ever so gently, of a military option against North Korea. He liked the idea, and when Ziang began to recite the timeworn mantra about the need for the United States to show more flexibility with the North, the President stopped him. A bit more directly than I’d expected, he told Ziang that he was under a lot of pressure from hard-liners to use military force and added, on his own, that one also couldn’t rule out a nuclear Japan if the North remained unconstrained.

China didn’t especially want North Korea to have nuclear weapons, particularly if it meant that other Pacific-rim nations like Japan would subsequently also obtain nuclear weapons in order to maintain parity. China’s chief goal for the region was stability, as Vice President Richard ‘Dick’ Cheney notes:

It was with the intention of breaking this pattern of deceit and deception that President Bush in 2003 established the six-party talks made up of the United States, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, China, and Russia. The idea was to move away from bilateral, or one-on-one, negotiations that had failed in the past and to bring into the diplomatic process other nations that had an interest in preventing North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. China was particularly important, because as North Korea’s economic lifeline, China had considerable influence over the isolated and insular North Korean government. We knew that the Chinese were concerned about the regional instability that could arise from a nuclear-armed North Korea, particularly given the likelihood that nations like Japan and others would feel the need to follow suit.

Ultimately, China’s desire for stability meant that it also desired to keep North Korea free of nuclear weapons. Therefore, China was willing to participate in Bush’s plan for the “six party talks” and the first round of the talks were held in August 2003. Explaining the dynamic, President Bush writes:

The key to multilateral diplomacy with North Korea was China, which had close ties to its fellow communist nation. The challenge was that China and the United States had different interests on the Korean Peninsula. The Chinese wanted stability; we wanted freedom. They were worried about refugees flowing across the border; we were worried about starvation and human rights. But there was one area where we agreed: It was not in either of our interests to let Kim Jong-il have a nuclear weapon.

By early 2007, the talks had made enough progress that the DPRK was willing to again shut down a nuclear reactor in return for fuel and for better diplomatic relations with the United States and Japan. The talks continued into late 2007 and seemed poised for more beneficial breakthroughs.

Significant shifts in U.S. foreign policy after January 2009 caused the North Koreans to walk away from talks. The DPRK attempted to launch a satellite into earth orbit in April 2009. President Obama threatened increased economic sanctions against North Korea in response, but failed to actually implement those sanctions. Seeing this failure to continue the task to its conclusion, the DPRK judged Obama to be soft and therefore proceeded to conduct another test explosion of a nuclear weapon in May 2009.

The inclusion of China into the six party talks from 2003 onward was made possible by finding common ground which incentivized China to work with other nations as they collectively sought to help North Korea become less bellicose. China was and is a key factor in any interactions with the DPRK. But when the United States revealed that, after January 2009, it was unwilling to consistently follow through on its stated intentions, e.g., the intention to implement economic sanctions, then North Korea simply walked away from the negotiations.

A Persistent Problem: The Global Community Ponders North Korea

The macro patterns of North Korea — the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK — are clear: disregard for the physical wellbeing of its citizens; repression of any freedom of speech, thought, or belief; a maniacal militarism; the deification of its absolute dictator; the globe’s most extreme isolationism; an aggressive persecution of religion; and a paranoid belief that the other nations of the world are deadly enemies.

The micro patterns of the DPRK’s internal politics and external foreign policy are less well presented in the news media, and often thoroughly understood and studied only by specialists.

The ruling dynasty in North Korea began with Kim Il-Sung, who was installed as ruler prior to the founding of the DPRK as a state in 1948. He ruled until his death in 1994. During the reign of Kim Il-Sung, North Korea began developing nuclear weapons. The other nations of the world attempted to use diplomacy to persuade the DPRK to stop its efforts to build atomic bombs, but these efforts were unsuccessful.

During these same decades, the DPRK was also developing missiles to deliver these nuclear weapons to targets thousands of miles away.

As countries around the globe became more nervous about the nuclear weapons program, diplomats hoped that China could play a role in a process to dissuade Kim Il-Sung from building atomic bombs. If China weren’t able to use diplomacy to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, perhaps it would use force. Decades later, leaders around the world would still be wondering about the same question: would China help to make the DPRK somewhat humane? In the second decades of the twenty-first century, they would look back to 1994 and see the parallels, as Robert Wampler wrote in 2013:

Then, as now, the role Beijing would play in resolving the crisis was a major unknown. But a partially declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from late January 1994 — published for the first time here and on the National Security Archive’s website — laid out Beijing’s options and possible responses, ranging from economic sanctions to war. The report notes that the Chinese needed to “reconcile their interest in stability on the Korean Peninsula and long-standing ties to Pyongyang with their interests in a denuclearized peninsula, in avoiding isolation among UN Security Council (SC) members, and in maintaining stable relations with the US, Japan and South Korea.”

While North Korea does not have good relations with any other nation, it has its least bad relations with China.

Since 1994 — at the latest — the global diplomatic community has hoped that China could be a factor in persuading North Korea to desist from its endless violations of human rights.

Kim Jong-Il inherited power in 1994 and continued the program to develop nuclear bombs. In 2006, the DPRK exploded its first atomic weapon in test. Between 2006 and 2023, North Korea has conducted a total of six such test explosions. Various intelligence agencies estimate that the country has an arsenal of between 20 and 115 atomic weapons on hand, with more being constructed on a regular basis. Its weapons continue to grow in number and sophistication, as do its missiles.

When Kim Jong-Il inherited the dictatorship in 2011, the family’s pattern of mental illness, narcissism, and brutal oppression remained unchanged. The people of the DPRK remained malnourished, uneducated, intimidated, misinformed, and subject to arrests, beatings, imprisonments, and executions at the whim of the state. The cruelties and oppression are obvious. The North Korean regime is inadvertently transparent, as Edward Luttwak writes:

The transparency is not due to anything revealed by North Korea’s string of rulers, from whom it is pointless to expect any change of policy — just because the previous one liked Japanese food and film stars, or because the current Kim Jong-un spent time in a Swiss boarding school. The regime, past and present, continues to exceed even Stalin’s Soviet Union in its pervasive secrecy, but what remains in full public view is more than enough to explain its frenetically aggressive stance.

Luttwak goes on to explain how economic calculations to divert resources into weapons programs and into the lavish lifestyle of the Kim and his cronies are unmistakable. Nobody — short-term visitor or lifelong citizen — can spend time in North Korea without understanding that this is a deliberate choice to keep the population at the starvation level, and that it is an explicit policy to demand complete unquestioning obedience and enthusiastic support from that population.

No resident of the DPRK is surprised when a neighbor, family member, or friend dies of starvation. That’s a routine occurrence. Neither are they surprised when a coworker disappears to spend decades in a prison camp — or to simply be killed.

In 2013, Frank Jannuzi reported:

Hundreds of thousands of people — including children — are arbitrarily held in political prison camps and other detention facilities, where they are subjected to forced labor, denial of food as punishment, torture and public executions. In 2011, Amnesty used satellites to document the apparent expansion of some of these prison camps. Last month, analysis of newly acquired images showed what appeared to be the blurring of lines between a political prison camp (Kwanliso-14) and the surrounding population, raising fears of new movement controls and other restrictions on people living near prison camps.

Because the DPRK government doesn’t understand Western Civilization’s habit of valuing human life, it is prone to make mistakes when dealing with the few outsiders who visit North Korea. One such incident involved an American college student whose fatal punishment was based on allegations that he might have taken a poster off a wall without permission.

The student, from the University of Virginia, was accused of stealing a poster, and sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp. He began serving that sentence in early 2016. In June 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson secured the student’s release. The student, named Otto Warmbier, was flown home to the United States. He had been released in such poor physical condition that he died several days after returning home.

The routine attitudes and practices of the DPRK’s authorities — i.e., capital punishment for an insignificant crime, if indeed a crime it was at all — suddenly caught the world’s attention.

The North Korean officials were surprised that anybody took note of Warmbier’s death. Such officials routinely assign individuals to be executed, or to spend life in prison.

Ambassador Nikki Haley recalls explaining the situation at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council:

”To Americans, the death of one innocent person can be as powerful as the death of millions,” I told the Security Council. “Because all men and women are created in God’s image, depravity toward one is a sure sign of willingness to do much more harm.”

At that point in time, three questions coalesced and caused for a renewed global effort to confront North Korea about its crimes: first, the continued production of atomic weapons and missiles to deliver them; second, the brutal disregard for human rights manifested in the prison camps and executions; third, the attempted extermination of people who showed evidence of spiritual or religious interest.

Nikki Haley spoke about actions which could accompany the words of the diplomats. Actions were needed because words along had failed. She said to the U.N. Security Council on that day in July 2017:

In the coming days, we will bring before the Security Council a resolution that raises the international response in a way that is proportionate to North Korea’s new escalation. I will not detail the resolution here today, but the options are all known to us. If we are unified, the international community can cut off the major sources of hard currency to the North Korean regime. We can restrict the flow of oil to their military and their weapons program. We can increase air and maritime restrictions. We can hold senior regime officials accountable.

North Korean citizens were being beaten and tortured by their own government. The DPRK was constructing missiles and nuclear weapons in an ongoing program. Freedom of thought, belief, or speech was almost nonexistent.

The coordinated efforts of Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, and officials from both the United Nations and the United States produced a slight thaw in North Korean behavior. The coordinated diplomatic and economic efforts were called “maximum pressure” tactics, a term borrowed from the global community’s similar approach to Iran at the time. Sadly, the small improvements were short-lived, and the DPRK returned to its oppressive ways.

Merely possessing a copy of the New Testament is a crime in North Korea, punishable by life in a prison camp or by death. In 2019, citing the research of Yeo-sang Yoon and Sun-young Han, Doug Bandow explained:

Kim Il-sung, still considered the DPRK’s “eternal president,” once explained that “we came to understand that religious persons can only be broken of a bad habit if they are killed.” While North Korean policy later relaxed — it could hardly grow stricter — religion remains under siege. Indeed, as border controls have loosened, Yoon and Han note, “the North Korean regime has tightened its watch on the refugees and defectors who are deported from China because of the fear that they have been exposed to religion.”

Bandow notes that children are taught to turn their parents over to the police if the parents possess a copy of the New Testament.

By 2023, the DPRK had resumed a vigorous weapons development campaign, emboldened by America’s embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan, and encouraged by the fact that much of the world’s attention was directed toward the conflict in Ukraine. To fund its weapons program, North Korea engaged in high-tech theft. In June 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that “North Korea’s hacker army stole $3 billion in crypto, funding” the “nuclear program.” The newspaper went on to report that the North Korean “​​regime has trained cybercriminals to impersonate tech workers or employers, amid other schemes.”

At the same time, the DPRK resumed arresting anyone who demonstrated an interest in religion. Political arrests continued, targeting anyone who failed to show great enthusiasm in supporting the Kim dynasty.