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.
