constructively and profitably with the U.S., the world’s established power. In part, his message was cautionary: He wanted the Americans to take China seriously and to understand that the relationship between the two nations had to be forged on mutual respect—not the mutual fear that, he said, had often led to wars between established and rising states.
As a sign of his good faith, he pointed to the “big gift” he had recently given Washington: his public pressuring of the North Korean regime to enter nuclear talks, very much against Pyongyang’s wishes.7 Xi’s intervention with the North Koreans was indeed welcome, as far as it went. But even the wording Xi used—a “big gift”—gives away that from his perspective, reining in North Korea is an American interest, not a Chinese one. More crucially, Xi’s apparent change of heart about Pyongyang and his assurances to Washington are part of a long historical pattern in which both China and Russia say one thing to America’s face and then turn right around and resume their support of rogue regimes.
It is well known that only one country can exert any serious influence on the behavior of the North Korean regime: China. The alliance between the two nations dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when Mao famously described the relationship as being as “close as lips and teeth.”8 Since then, it’s gone through its share of bumpy patches, but China has never fully abandoned Pyongyang—and it has a decades-long track record of supplying the North Koreans with weaponry, economic aid, and diplomatic cover. If every rogue nation had that kind of support from its sponsor, the world would be more unstable than it is currently. At best, China acts as a braking influence on Pyongyang, and even then, only when the North Koreans’ behavior becomes so volatile that it threatens China’s broader interests. For the most part, this happens when the Kim regime acts recklessly on the nuclear issue, as it did repeatedly in 2013.
In February 2013, the Hermit Kingdom launched its third nuclear test, this time of a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear device with greater explosive force than previously.” In April, the regime ratcheted up its threats against the United States and its “puppet,” South Korea, with a series of moves. It warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea so they wouldn’t be caught in a “thermonuclear war.” The country’s KCNA news agency predicted that once war broke out, it would be “an all-out war, a merciless, sacred, retaliatory war to be waged by North Korea.”9 That warning followed on the heels of the North’s decision to suspend the activity of its 53,000 workers at the Kaesong industrial park that it runs with South Korea, the last vestige of cooperation between the two countries. Kim also threatened to scrap the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War and to abandon the joint declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Then in April and May, Kim’s regime launched a series of short-range missiles into the East Sea (just off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast) and at least one missile into the Sea of Japan.10 The regime even released a hysterical, but disturbing, fictional video depicting missile strikes on the White House and the Capitol in Washington. From its graphics to its music and almost parodic voice-over, the video was absurd; it might even have been funny, in a Team America sort of way. As another manifestation of the regime’s madness, though, it left few observers laughing.
Kim’s behavior got so out of hand that in March, China and the U.S. co-authored UN sanctions against Pyongyang covering banking, travel, and trade.11 Xi’s foreign minister, Yang, stood alongside Secretary of State John Kerry in April 2013 and said, “China is firmly committed to upholding peace and stability and advancing the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula.”12 In May, Xi told the North Koreans to return to diplomatic talks about their nukes.13 As Xi put it bluntly: “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world in chaos for selfish gain.”14 His tough words made clear how exasperated the Chinese had become with North Korea—what some call China’s “Pyongyang fatigue.”
The U.S. was encouraged. But a closer look at China’s North Korean track record makes clear that the Chinese never truly move against North Korea. Xi’s gestures notwithstanding, they continue to support the regime in all the ways that really matter. Without the Chinese, Pyongyang couldn’t even keep its lights on. Beijing supplies nearly all the fuel for the outlaw regime and 83 percent of its imports: grain, heavy machinery, consumer goods, you name it. The Chinese also supply the luxury goods, including pleasure boats and glamorous vehicles for the North Korean elite. Despite its leading role in authorizing the 2013 UN sanctions, China has kept this trade going—much of it in violation of those same sanctions. In light of all this, it’s hard to see China’s decision to cut off the North Korean bank accused of weapons dealing, mentioned in Chapter 1, as much more than a throwaway gesture.15
The North Koreans, if anything, are “doubling down,” as the Wall Street Journal put it in April 2013, on their Chinese dependence, suggesting that they have confidence in the steadfastness of their Beijing sponsor. Almost all of the nation’s recent economic development, such as it is, is owing to Chinese support, including deals signed by Chinese mining firms eager to get in on North Korea’s largely untapped mineral wealth, which some recent reports estimate may be worth as much as $6 trillion. Other Chinese investments have included transportation, power generation, and infrastructure. Roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s joint ventures with foreign partners are Chinese.16
“North Korea’s lifeline to the outside world,” says the Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, is the port city of Dandong, on the Chinese border.17 About 70 percent of the $6 billion in annual trade between the two countries flows through Dandong. The black-market economy, meanwhile, may be even larger than the official trade. Even after the 2013 sanctions, trade continued unimpeded in Dandong, despite China’s shuttering of the Kwangson Bank, which had channeled billions in foreign currency to Pyongyang.
Only the Chinese can enforce what the UN has put in place. But, as Moore writes, North Korea’s elites continue to get whatever they need in Dandong: “Their shopping list includes luxury food and fine wine, Apple iMacs for Kim Jong Un, 30, as well as Chinese-built missile launchers and components for their nuclear arsenal.”18 Trucks leave the city every day transporting grain, fertilizer, and consumer goods to North Korea.
The 2013 UN sanctions also stipulated weapons seizures. But as one Western diplomat put it, “that will remain a largely ineffective measure until the Chinese implement it.”19 Don’t bet on that happening. North Korea still makes money off its lone export—weapons. The regime sells Soviet-era technology on the black market, especially to some bankrupt African nations. Although this trade is often intercepted during inspections of North Korean ships, some of it gets through, and it almost certainly couldn’t do so without Chinese acquiescence.20
In September 2013, Beijing released a 236-page list of equipment and chemical substances banned for export to North Korea—“fearing,” as the New York Times noted, “that the North would use the items to speed development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb on top.”21 This seemed an encouraging sign of Beijing’s willingness to clamp down on Kim’s regime and his nuclear ambitions, especially as Western officials have long known that sanctions cannot work without Chinese enforcement. But the list also revealed just how extensive Beijing’s knowledge is of the North Korean nuclear program. And it’s one thing to make a list, another to enforce it. Finally, these embryonic gestures of cooperation, if cooperation it is, must be balanced against a much longer and ongoing track record of adversarial behavior. (Just two months later, the New York Times reported on a U.S. study detecting new construction at a North Korean missile-launch site—including satellite imagery suggesting that North Korea may have begun producing fuel rods for its recently restarted five-megawatt reactor.22)
“Washington is looking to China to rein in the North Koreans. Unfortunately, Beijing has been busy giving the Kim regime the means to rock the world,”
