N. Korea seen now as irritant for China

General’s comments in state paper illustrate debate in Beijing over alliance

Visiting Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao (left) and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attend a military parade in Pyongyang in July 2013.
Visiting Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao (left) and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attend a military parade in Pyongyang in July 2013.

BEIJING -- When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country's young leader, Kim Jong Un.

For decades, China has stood by North Korea, and although at times the relationship has soured, it has rarely reached such a low point, Chinese analysts say.

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The fact that the commentary by Lt. Gen. Wang Hongguang, a former deputy commander of an important military region, was published in a state-run newspaper this month and then posted on an official People's Liberation Army website attested to how much the relationship had deteriorated, the analysts say.

"China has cleaned up the DPRK's mess too many times," Wang wrote in The Global Times, using the initials of North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "But it doesn't have to do that in the future."

Of the government in North Korea, he said: "If an administration isn't supported by the people, 'collapse' is just a matter of time." Moreover, North Korea had violated the spirit of the mutual defense treaty with China, he said, by failing to consult China on its nuclear weapons program, which has created instability in Northeast Asia.

The significance of Wang's article was given greater weight because he wrote it in reply to another Global Times article by a Chinese expert on North Korea, professor Li Dunqiu, who took a more traditional approach, arguing that North Korea was a strategic asset that China should not abandon. Li is a former director of the Office of Korean Affairs at China's State Council.

In a debate that unfolded among other commentators in the pages of Global Times after the duel between Wang and Li, the general's point of view -- that North Korea represented a strategic liability -- got considerable support. Wang is known as a princeling general: His father, Wang Jianqing, led Mao Zedong's troops in the fight against the Japanese in Nanjing at the end of World War II.

Efforts to reach Wang through an intermediary were unsuccessful. The general's secretary told the intermediary that the views in his article were his own and did not reflect those of the military.

How widespread his views have become within the military establishment is difficult to gauge, but a Chinese official who is closely involved in China's diplomacy with North Korea said that Wang's disparaging attitude was more prevalent in the Chinese military today than in any previous period.

"General Wang's views really reflect the views of many Chinese -- and within the military views are varied," said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Relations between the North Korean and Chinese militaries have never been close even though they fought together during the Korean War, the official said. The two militaries do not conduct joint exercises and remain wary of each other, experts say.

China has said little about the accusation by President Barack Obama's administration that North Korea was responsible for the hacking of Sony Pictures over a movie, The Interview. However, U.S. officials said they had reached out to China to help block North Korea's ability to initiate cyberattacks. China has not yet responded to the request, the officials said.

Despite the disdain for North Korea in official Chinese circles, there was probably some secret admiration for what the North Koreans appeared to have done, said Zhang Baohui, director of the center for Asian Pacific studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Even in the current cold relationship between China and North Korea there were definite limits to how far China would side with the United States on North Korea, he said. The "mistrust and rivalry" between Washington and Beijing meant China, in the event of a collapse of North Korea, could not tolerate a unified Korean Peninsula allied with Washington.

An editorial Saturday in The Global Times criticized Hollywood for "cultural arrogance," saying that despite what Americans think of Kim Jong Un, he remains the country's leader.

Still, the perilous state of the relationship between North Korea and China was on display again Wednesday when Pyongyang marked the third anniversary of the death of Kim Jong Il, the father of the current leader, and failed to invite a senior Chinese official to the commemoration.

The last time a Chinese leader visited North Korea was in July 2013, when Vice President Li Yuanchao tried to patch up relations and pressed North Korea -- after its third nuclear test in February 2013 -- to slow down its nuclear weapons program.

Li failed in that quest. The North Korean nuclear program "is continuing full speed ahead," said Siegfried Hecker, a professor at Stanford University and former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The heightened debate in China is spurred in part by fears that North Korea could collapse even though economic conditions in the agriculture sector seemed ready to improve, several Chinese analysts said. One of the tricky balancing acts for China is how much to curtail fuel supplies and other financial support without provoking a collapse that could send refugees into China's northeastern provinces and result in a unified Korean Peninsula loyal to the United States.

"The general state of relations between North Korea and China is hard," said Zheng Jiyong, director of the Center for Korean Studies at Fudan University, who just returned to China after four months in Pyongyang. "If China presses DPRK too hard it could collapse. But if it doesn't press hard enough it will become uncontrolled and do more things like nuclear tests."

A Section on 12/21/2014

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