By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Last month, the White House confirmed that North Korea—a country with few allies and little money—had sent thousands of soldiers to join Russia in its war against Ukraine. Pyongyang was already supplying Moscow with weapons: according to The Times of London, half of Russia’s shells used in the war have come from North Korea. But sending personnel marks a new level of coordination. There are other signs of warming ties, too. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first trip to North Korea in over two decades.

That proximity has irked China, North Korea’s main backer. Chinese officials fear that Russia’s influence over the insular dictatorship is growing at China’s expense. They also worry that the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia will strengthen military cooperation in response to Russia and North Korea’s newfound closeness. Over the past year, Beijing has chosen to react to Pyongyang’s collaboration with Moscow by publicly courting North Korea’s adversaries. For instance, in May, China held a trilateral summit with South Korea and Japan after a five-year hiatus. On the same day in June that Putin visited Pyongyang, Chinese and South Korean officials held a security dialogue in Seoul—the first meeting in nine years.

This seeming friction between China and North Korea has tantalized many Western security analysts, who have argued that the United States and its allies should try to drive a wedge between China and North Korea. Such an effort, however, would be futile. Despite signs of tension between the two countries, North Korea is overwhelmingly reliant on China. Nearly all of its trade, for instance, is with China. The countries have not always seen eye to eye over the past 75 years, but their relationship has never come close to splintering. Instead of focusing on what could divide North Korea from China, the United States should collaborate with the Chinese government to rein in North Korea’s volatile behavior. The United States and China are ultimately invested in maintaining peace on the Korean Peninsula. Working together to restrain the North Korean regime is the best way to achieve it.

 

Longtime Frenemies

Although North Korea is often imagined as a mere satrap of China, it is not, in fact, a Chinese vassal, and it has long sought to achieve a great degree of autonomy in its foreign policy. The two countries have endured many moments of friction in their relationship. In August 1956, Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s ruler and the grandfather of the current leader, fumed at Chinese and Soviet involvement in an attempted coup against him and bristled at subsequent Chinese and Soviet efforts to dissuade him from purging those officials who he believed were involved in the plot. During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Chinese Red Guards labeled Kim a “counterrevolutionary dictator.” The fact that China tolerated open criticism of North Korea’s leadership put further strain on the relationship between the two governments. Back then, Pyongyang also played Beijing and Moscow against each other. During the rapprochement between China and the United States in the 1970s (which followed the split between China and the Soviet Union), North Korea hosted Soviet naval ships in its ports and allowed Soviet fighter jets to enter North Korean airspace. Throughout the 1980s, in response to North Korea’s tilt toward Russia, China increased its diplomatic contacts with South Korea.

Relations between China and North Korea hit another low point in 1992 when China formally established diplomatic relations with South Korea against Kim’s wishes. China further irked North Korea by joining international sanctions against Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear weapons programs in 2006. Pyongyang, for its part, often acted without consulting Beijing on matters that could seriously affect China’s security. In 2006, following North Korea’s first nuclear test, Beijing accused Pyongyang of “brazen” action, a term rarely used in official Chinese statements. North Korea’s nuclear tests violated a treaty between the two countries that requires them to “consult with each other on all important international questions of common interest.” In 2017, in a moment of great tension between North Korea and the first Trump administration, Beijing openly criticized Pyongyang. An editorial in the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, argued that “North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons . . . seriously harms China’s national security” and therefore violates their treaty.

Over the past year, there have been signs that China and North Korea have entered another rough patch. Beyond lending troops to Russia, North Korea has signaled its frustration with China over what it perceives to be a lack of diplomatic and economic support. In 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, for example, gave notably more attention to Russia’s defense minister than to China’s envoy at the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. In July 2024, North Korea stopped disseminating its state television broadcasts from a Chinese satellite and started using a Russian one. Last month, when Kim and Chinese leader Xi Jinping exchanged messages marking the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between their two countries, Kim omitted traditional niceties, including “dear” and “respectful leader,” and terms that show bonds between the two countries, such as “blood-forged socialism,” in his letters to Beijing. These subtle symbolic and rhetorical shifts suggest that North Korea is dissatisfied with China.

Meanwhile, China has used economic policies to express its frustration with North Korea for its current alignment with Russia and its refusal to consult with China over military provocations, such as weapon tests. Over the past year, Beijing has cracked down on North Korean smuggling, restricted the sale of North Korean seafood in China, and made it harder for Chinese boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters. (Chinese fishermen used to pay Pyongyang for the privilege, with Beijing turning a blind eye.) According to The Korea Times, in July 2024 Beijing demanded that Pyongyang recall North Korean workers in China—numbered in the tens of thousands—so that China could comply with UN Security Council Resolution 2937, which called for the repatriation of North Korean laborers. The move would further cut off North Korea from foreign currency that it desperately needs.

These punishments are especially painful since North Korea’s economy has been severely strained by international sanctions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and economic mismanagement. Between 2016 and 2022, the country’s exports fell by 94 percent and its imports decreased by 61 percent. North Korea needs all the help it can get, but China has been doing the opposite: intensifying sanctions. Unsure of China’s intentions, North Korea has turned to Russia for economic, diplomatic, and military cooperation.

Through these punitive measures, China is not just trying to chastise Pyongyang for cozying up to Russia; it’s also seeking to curry favor with the United States and Europe. Since the summit between Xi and U.S. President Joe Biden in November 2023, Beijing has appeared determined to stabilize U.S.-Chinese relations so that it can still attract foreign investment from Western countries and maintain strong trading ties with them. In this context, North Korea’s belligerence toward South Korea and Japan and its military support of Russia has become a liability for China’s engagement with the West, because the United States and Europe see China as North Korea’s patron, and therefore as partly responsible for Pyongyang’s behavior.

 

A Needy Neighbor

Some Western scholars have argued that tensions between China and North Korea present the United States and its allies with a chance to push the two countries apart. Such thinking, however, is wishful. Despite moments of discord, ties between North Korea and China are resilient. North Korea has been economically dependent on China for its survival since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it grew even more reliant on Beijing after the UN ramped up sanctions on North Korea’s nuclear program in 2017. China has effectively become a lifeline for North Korea, supplying essential goods such as food, clothing, fertilizer, machinery, and construction materials—nearly everything that sustains the daily lives of North Koreans and the country’s industries. Between 1994 and 2023, North Korea accumulated a trade deficit with China of more than $20 billion. North Korea’s 2024 treaty with Russia expands trade between the two countries, but it doesn’t reduce Beijing’s leverage over Pyongyang in a meaningful way. In 2023, China accounted for 98 percent of North Korea’s official trade volume.

When tensions ratchet up, the two countries quickly mend fences. Xi, for example, didn’t meet with Kim once between 2012 and 2017 but met with him five times from 2018 to 2019, after a summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump was announced (without Beijing’s approval). Even though China maintains enormous leverage over its neighbor, it refrains from playing hardball so as not to push North Korea into the arms of Russia or even the United States. When China joined UN sanctions on North Korea in 2006—in response to North Korea’s first nuclear test—Pyongyang reacted by holding bilateral talks with Washington without Beijing’s approval. China has since made an effort to avoid being bypassed by maintaining close channels of communication with Pyongyang. China also fears that applying pressure to North Korea, which is already strained by an economic crisis, could push the Kim regime to the brink of regime collapse. It is highly uncertain—even to China’s leadership—how Pyongyang would act if backed into a corner. In the worst-case scenario, Pyongyang may resort to attacking South Korea to deliberately create an external crisis, forcing China to intervene on North Korea’s behalf. Therefore, Beijing has to carefully assess the risks when considering how much it can push North Korea.

In the current era of U.S.-Chinese strategic competition, North Korea’s value to China extends beyond its role as a buffer zone between Chinese and U.S. forces. From Beijing’s perspective, during a conflict with the United States over Taiwan, maintaining close ties with North Korea is advantageous because Pyongyang can help tie down U.S. troops in the region by keeping open the possibility of another war. However, it remains uncertain whether Beijing would pre-coordinate with North Korea before taking military action against Taiwan, or if they would even want to coordinate such involvement if it could lead to conflict spreading from the Taiwan Strait to the Korean Peninsula.

 

Go Smaller

Chinese strategists are understandably wary of attempts by Western countries to exploit tensions between China and North Korea. In July 2024, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the South Korean press of spreading “groundless rumors” about rifts in the Chinese–North Korean relationship and reaffirmed the bond between the two countries. In reaction to North Korea’s growing ties with Russia, the United States and its allies in East Asia might strengthen their military cooperation—something China perceives as a threat to its own security. In this scenario, any effort by the United States to exploit tensions between China and North Korea backfire. The more Beijing believes that the United States is trying to weaken Chinese influence by driving a wedge between China and North Korea, the more valuable North Korea becomes to China—which may be exactly Pyongyang’s calculus.

To avoid such an outcome, the United States and its allies should focus on identifying interests they share with China: namely, preventing the outbreak of a war on the Korean Peninsula. Expecting Beijing to take extreme measures, such as suspending oil supplies or humanitarian aid to North Korea, is unrealistic. Instead of driving China and North Korea apart, Washington should try to capitalize on Beijing’s power over Pyongyang by urging China to clearly communicate two redlines to its partner. First, North Korea must refrain from directly assaulting South Korean lives and property, as it did in the 2010 Cheonan torpedo attack and Yeonpyeong Island shelling. Since these incidents, South Korea’s military doctrine has become far more offensive. Any North Korean attack, even on a limited scale, would trigger South Korean retaliation, and could spiral into all-out war. Second, North Korea must avoid conducting its seventh nuclear test. A seventh test would likely be geared toward developing a nuclear weapon with a small yield that would be easier to deploy. Such a test would be a sign of China’s weakening influence over Pyongyang and could spur Seoul to try to acquire nuclear weapons of its own—a position that both South Korea and the United States officially oppose but is gaining traction in Western policy circles.

U.S. efforts to drive a wedge between China and North Korea could backfire, potentially strengthening their autocratic alliance. To secure meaningful cooperation from China, it would be more effective for Washington to keep its requests specific, realistic, and geared toward achieving shared interests. A more focused approach is likely to yield better results.

 

 

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