Some interesting quotes from the Washington post’s article “Pyongyang’s Accomplice, The WikiLeaks cables reveal a China that abets North Korea’s WMD proliferation”:
“China has also played a key role in abetting the North’s proliferation schemes. A November 2007 memo signed by then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complains that shipments of North Korean ballistic missile jet vanes “frequently transit Beijing on regularly scheduled flights” but that the Chinese had failed to act on specific information provided by the U.S. and despite a direct appeal by President Bush to Chinese paramount leader Hu Jintao.
That pattern of behavior remains unchanged. An October report by the Congressional Research Service notes that the “seaborne cargo of North Korean arms seized in Dubai in July 2009 had visited several Chinese ports and was transported from Dalian, China, to Shanghai aboard a Chinese ship, again without a Chinese effort to conduct a search. Overland routes for procurement of WMD-related goods are reportedly also common, due to the participation of Chinese entities.”
The CRS report is also interesting for the light it sheds on how the Chinese prop up North Korea’s Kim dynasty. Resolution 1874, adopted by the U.N. Security Council last year after the North conducted its second nuclear test, forbids the sale of luxury goods to North Korea—goods Kim Jong Il uses to buy off his elites. Yet China exported $136.1 million worth of such goods to North Korea in 2009, including “160 luxury cars (made in China) to directors of provincial committees of the Korean Workers Party and to municipal committee secretaries.”
Why the warm embrace? In one of the most interesting of the leaked cables—a report of a conversation last year between Lee Kuan Yew and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg—Singapore’s Minister Mentor suggests an answer. “The Chinese,” he said, “do not want North Korea, which China sees as a buffer state, to collapse. [South Korea] would take over in the North and China would face a U.S. presence at its border.”
Mr. Lee is right that Beijing must make hard-headed calculations regarding the North: China cannot escape its shared border, and the effects of the North’s collapse would be immediately felt on its side of the Yalu.
But the interests of “stability” cannot account for China’s role in facilitating the North’s proliferation of dangerous material to the rest of the world. Nor can China’s refusal to restrain the North from fomenting serial crises on the Korean peninsula be explained as the deeds of a power interested in maintaining a peaceful status quo. The Kim regime’s militarism is destabilizing in Northeast Asia and its proliferation is a source of global mayhem.
China’s support for such a regime for so many years suggests that Beijing may see strategic benefit in the North’s behavior. It may want a proxy that discomfits its neighbors and makes South Korea and Japan wonder if they can trust the U.S. defense umbrella. Perhaps some in the politburo or People’s Liberation Army think this is a way that China can assert its regional authority and drive the U.S. out of the Northeast Pacific. If so, they are mistaken.
From what we can glean from the cables, it’s encouraging to see that the Obama Administration seems to have few illusions about North Korea and the abetting role played by China. Compared to Mr. Bush in his second term, this Administration has been relatively tough and realistic. But if China really is the key to better North Korean behavior, then Washington will have to confront Beijing more bluntly than it has dared so far”.
