Hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers, including the eldest son of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), gave their lives to prevent North Korea’s demise during the Korean War, which began on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded South Korea, and unofficially ended on July 27, 1953, in a truce.
Since then, the relationship between China and North Korea has been governed by what the Chinese call chun wang chi han (唇亡齒寒, “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold”). In other words, North Korea is the lips to China’s teeth.
Hwang Jang-yop, a top North Korean official who defected to the South, said that then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il repeatedly told his subordinates that they “should be more on guard against China than against the US imperialists and South Korea,” because the late dictator felt that China did not sufficiently assist North Korea diplomatically, nor with food, cash and energy aid.
Hwang, who died in 2010, also predicted that North Korea would continue underground nuclear tests, deployed at an opportune moment to convey, in part, that: first, North Korea was unhappy with China’s lukewarm and sometimes negative diplomatic support; second, if China truly regarded the North as its lips, it should increase material and financial aid; and third, the teeth do not have suzerainty over the lips.
Several Chinese think tank experts and mid-level policymakers have been known to favor “halting North Korea’s [nuclear and missile] folly” and disciplining China’s “spoiled child.”
However, there seems to be no change in the strategic thinking of top Chinese leaders that Beijing would prefer a nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile-equipped North to a US military presence on its border. So there is no better option for Beijing than to assist Pyongyang to survive the sanctions imposed by the international community led by the US.
China accounts for more than 60 percent of North Korea’s exports and more than 90 percent of its imports. It supports Pyongyang despite international sanctions, and has advocated reducing economic sanctions amid denuclearization talks.
Notwithstanding its lopsided dependence on China, the North does not seem willing to put its ultimate security and survival in Beijing’s hands. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s position toward its ally does not appear to be different from that of his father’s or grandfather’s.
It is evident that Kim Jong-un has not forgotten that China supported Western sanctions against Pyongyang until recently when its relationship with the US deteriorated. As his father did, Kim Jong-un seems to fear the capricious ally (China) and the clear adversary (the US).
Kim Jong-un has met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) five times. All official discussions focused on economic development and cooperation and emphasized the importance of stability in the region.
There were no explicit references in official statements from either China or North Korea regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. In short, such programs were fait accompli and did not deserve any explicit mention from either side.
A pertinent and vexing question arises: How will South Korea cope with a China determined to keep unruly North Korean lips alive to protect its teeth?
Many South Koreans tend to assume that the US will stay in East Asia for many decades to constrain China and North Korea. Some even think — naively — that if South Korea remains affluent under US protection, the North would collapse and the Chinese would let South Koreans absorb the North.
However, South Koreans, who are keenly interested in reading “China’s mind,” would reach a sharply different conclusion if they listened to an alternative prophecy that Chinese elites often provide in their honest conversations with their Asian friends.
In a nutshell, the prophecy of confident Chinese elites is about the historical circumstance of “a risen China” or even “a triumphant China,” which can be summarized as follows:
The US presence and influence in East Asia have substantially diminished after a devastating financial crisis and economic mess that the US created from 2007 to 2009. With its economy still in shambles, the US has neither the resources nor the will to sustain its East Asian presence and vigil.
The middle class, which is the backbone of any stable and prosperous country, has been shrinking in the US year in, year out, and would further shrink amid and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Monies concentrated in a few hands do not go into productive investments. As a result, US infrastructure capital — roads, dams, bridges, power grids, railroads — and social capital — trust among citizens — are falling apart.
A large population inhabits the US in poverty or near poverty. The quality of its education is already embarrassingly low and getting even lower. It will lose leadership in technological development and, without a strong economy, will even cease to be the best armed. The country is fractured along racial, socioeconomic and ideological lines.
There is neither shared national purpose nor leadership that can instill a sense of unity into a sufficiently large segment of the population. It is even losing its awareness of being the sole global superpower. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, because of its lack of success in defeating international terrorism, its bravado has been disabused.
One of these days, the US will most likely quit East Asia out of exhaustion and lack rationale for being there. It can have the east part of the Pacific, Hawaii to the mainland US. China will take the western Pacific, from Hawaii to China.
China’s neighbors should know this: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,” as then-Chinese minister of foreign affairs Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) said at an ASEAN forum.
South Koreans should be anxious about the future of their nation and the Korean Peninsula. It does not require profound geopolitical wisdom to figure out how a triumphant, hyperauthoritarian China — a Han Chinese-centric, ethnonationalist police state — would treat its smaller neighbors if a substantial portion of the prophecy became a reality.
If China pulled the plug at the right moment, the regime in North Korea would become docile or be replaced by one that is subservient to Beijing. One cannot rule out that a second administration led by US President Donald Trump — unpredictable and with no other geopolitical vision except “America First” — might pull US troops out of South Korea with China’s agreement to take North Korea into its control as its suzerain. China, with US connivance, would disarm its new vassal state of nuclear arms.
For a while, China would not try to pressure the two Koreas to unify. It would enjoy playing the two against each other and South Korea against Japan. Deep-rooted Korean antipathy toward Japan would be welcome to the Chinese, who anticipate a steadily escalating Sino-Japanese rivalry.
Beijing would instigate South Korea to grow a pro-Chinese faction advocating a closer relationship with China. By the time South Korea became an ally of China, the world’s political map would have drastically changed. US influence on the African continent would have all but disappeared, replaced by China. The appearance of rapprochement between Israel and some Arab states is fragile, likely to collapse. NATO is losing its raison d’etre because Russia is not the same as the Soviet Union, no matter how it might continue to be expansionist.
China would let the two Koreas be reunified, not on the South’s or the US’ terms, but on Chinese terms. Allied with Beijing and losing its rationale for persuading the US to stay, the “new, one Korea” would kick the US military off the peninsula.
It also seems evident that “Beijing bully boys” would impose suzerainty over all of Korea as they did historically whenever it was close to China.
Another possibility is that a US administration under either former US vice president Joe Biden or Trump, the US presence in South Korea would not immediately end. The ideological confrontation between the US and China-North Korea would continue, if not intensify.
Beijing would let Pyongyang play its childish game with rhetoric and rockets against the US, South Korea and Japan, inviting retaliation with conventional bombs on selected targets. An apocalypse might unfold, depending on the extent of Chinese maturity.
Now is the time for a wise and competent new South Korean leadership that could engineer an internationally worked out peace treaty guaranteeing denuclearization and peace on the peninsula, in partnership with the US. Such a treaty would require a team of international peacekeepers stationed in the South and the North, allowing steadily increasing interaction.
For the past decade, the world has seen no progress toward peace and stability on the peninsula. However, there exists a possibility for a dramatic innovation in international diplomacy. A substantial number of nations exist that would join the collective effort to realize a durable structure of peace and stability.
However, it is sad to note that today’s South Korea seems to be suffering from a myopic lack of concern to discern real threats and opportunities for the divided peninsula. It looks busy indulging vainglorious, hedonistic and mindless accumulation of wealth and pre-modern religiosity.
South Korean elites seem to display little, if any, ability to understand history rationally through non-distorted evidence.
It behooves South Koreans to graduate from the assumption that the US will stay in South Korea and East Asia for many years and restrain China’s imperialistic impulses. They should stop dreaming that if Pyongyang collapses, China will let Seoul absorb it.
South Koreans should be prepared for existential exigencies. They should start devising strategies to avoid an apocalypse on the peninsula, and prevent — by any means — either South Korea or a unified Korea from becoming another Tibet, Xinjiang or Inner Mongolia.
The first step is to elect as president a man or woman with a stalwart spine (self-respect), strategic vision and wisdom regarding geopolitics. For example, someone like President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who leads people in the face of exigent existential situations that demand timely and brave action.
Paraphrasing a poem by poet Lee Min-yung (李敏勇), I would tell such a man or woman:
“If you ask
What is the future of the Korean Peninsula?
I will tell you
Step out on your feet
The road is open to you.”
Yeomin Yoon is a professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
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