The top item on the Chinese Web site of Beijing’s embassy in Pyongyang is a condemnation of North Korea’s nuclear test.
That, and a recent blast of blunt criticism of North Korea in China’s state-run press, suggest the rancor that officials feel toward their neighbour — anger likely to bring Beijing behind a UN resolution condemning the May 25 test and threatening fresh sanctions.
North Korea’s second nuclear test took place 85km from China’s border, and the tremors from the blast forced many schools on the Chinese side to evacuate, wrote Zhang Lianggui (張璉瑰), an expert on the North. He warned of catastrophe if Pyongyang mishandles a nuclear test.
“Future generations of the Korean people will have no place of their own, and China’s reviving northeast will burst like a bubble,” Zhang wrote in the popular tabloid Global Times yesterday. “This is an unprecedented threat that China has never faced in its thousands of years.”
On Monday, a commentary in the same paper called North Korea a “strategic burden” for China. Not the kind of language the government would have allowed earlier this year, when the focus was on celebrating 60 years of ties with Pyongyang.
Zhan Debin (詹德斌), an expert on Korea at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote in the paper that Beijing could soon be pushed to abandon its usual reticence.
“If this continues, China will not be able to stall international expectations by saying that North Korea doesn’t listen or that we have no influence,” Zhan wrote.
If Pyongyang continues raising the international stakes, Zhan wrote, war could not be ruled out.
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