Does China Really Control North Korea?

After U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s July trip to North Korea fell flat – one source told CNN the visit went “as badly as it could have gone” – policymakers began looking to cast the blame. A mere month after the highly touted meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, it looked like the scant progress made was already falling apart.

Trump suggested a possible culprit on Twitter: China.

He and Kim had “agreed to the denuclearization of North Korea,” Trump tweeted. “China… may be exerting negative pressure on a deal because of our posture on Chinese Trade-Hope Not!”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was even more direct: “I see China's hands all over this” – meaning the broadside from North Korea after Pompeo’s trip – he told Fox News. “We’re in a fight with China. If I were President Trump, I would not let China use North Korea to back me off of the trade dispute.”

These remarks continue an all-too-common refrain from U.S. officials, legislators, and analysts: that China can dictate North Korean behavior. Trump himself touted the idea that “China controls North Korea” while on the campaign trail, although he quickly toned down that rhetoric after a talking-to from Chinese President Xi Jinping. “After listening [to Xi] for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump admitted. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it's not what you would think.”

However, despite that seeming change of heart, Trump still suggested during the recent diplomatic process that China should be seen as responsible for each North Korean “change in attitude.” Earlier, for example, when Trump briefly cancelled his summit with Kim, he suggested that a meeting between Xi and Kim had been the cause of North Korea’s newly belligerent rhetoric.

The truth, as any North Korea expert could have told Trump, is that there has been no “change in attitude” from Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un never agreed to the sort of denuclearization that Washington hopes for – and likely never will. Despite Pompeo’s claims to the contrary, the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” referenced in the Trump-Kim statement and the earlier Panmunjom Declaration does not equate to the U.S. mantra of the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea.

In other words, China should not be blamed for a North Korean change of heart because no change has occurred. 

However, sentiments like those expressed by Trump and Graham are misplaced on a broader level as well. There’s a tendency to talk about China as the actor, and North Korea as Beijing’s passive pawn, which is an utterly unrealistic way of looking at the situation. China can no more “control” North Korea than the United States can “control” its own allies (yet, ironically, the inverse of this same mistaken notion often plays out in Beijing, with Washington blamed for “bad behavior” from Tokyo, Seoul, or Manila).

China’s goals for the Korean Peninsula do not completely align with Washington’s, but neither do they match up with the behavior we have seen from Kim thus far. What China wants more than anything else is stability – and Beijing strongly believes that will only follow from an economic transformation in the vein of China’s own “reform and opening up.” An economically viable and globally integrated North Korea would relieve China of the burden of supporting a prickly client state, and help clear up a dark blot on Beijing’s international reputation.

Yet North Korea has shown few signs of seriously considering this path, any more than it has shown concrete willingness to denuclearize. Which begs the question: if China can control North Korea, why has it failed so far to achieve its own ends?

The truth is that the alliance relationship cuts both ways. North Korea is utterly dependent on China economically, but China also needs North Korea strategically. If Beijing were to cut Pyongyang off completely – to assert its “control” – it would cause chaos on China’s border and potentially upset the geopolitical balance in a way that could advantage the United States.

For a (very) rough parallel, consider the example of the U.S.-Thailand alliance. The coup of 2014, and ensuring military rule, with an eye toward the long-term gutting of Thai democracy, is decidedly out of step with U.S. values. In theory, Washington could exert its “control” over Thailand, as a close ally, to stop the slide toward dictatorship – but doing so would undermine the alliance relationship, and potentially open the door for China to step in and makes gain at the United States’ expense. Instead, Washington decided to hold its nose and accept the situation to salvage the strategic benefit of the partnership.

That is essentially what China has done for decades with North Korea. It’s easy to forget now, thanks to a flurry of visits from Kim to China, but China-North Korea ties have been rocky for over five years. This is not a warm partnership but an unhappy marriage, where each side dislikes the other but calculates that divorce is more costly than staying the course.

Chinese officials have often described the relationship with North Korea as being “as close as lips and teeth.” But another, closely related Chinese idiom is a more accurate depiction: If the lips are lost, the teeth feel cold. In other words, China – the teeth – needs North Korea – the lips – to provide a security buffer. There may be no love lost between the two, but Beijing can’t do without Pyongyang.

Mao Zedong made the same calculation nearly 70 years ago, when deciding to intervene to prop up Kim Il Sung’s regime against an American-led counterinvasion. Kim’s attack on South Korea was decidedly against Chinese interests – the ensuing Korean War ruined Mao’s best chance to take Taiwan and end the Chinese Civil War once and for all. But the teeth needed the lips, and so China intervened on North Korea’s behalf to keep its neighboring state from falling. The memory of Imperial Japan annexing Korea, then using it as a launching pad for its invasion of China, was simply too fresh to do otherwise.

China undoubtedly has influence over North Korea, but Pyongyang is well aware of the limits of Beijing’s power. North Korea knows its usefulness to China, and has proven adept at translating that usefulness to diplomatic, economic, and military gains. So if North Korea is helping China out by throwing a wrench in Trump’s plans as the U.S.-China trade war heats up, you can be sure that’s something Kim Jong Un meant to do all along.