Nope.
In my current piece for
Asia Times Online (reproduced below) I argue that the PRC leadership has, for
better or worse, reconciled itself to a nuclear North Korea, since the
alternative—the Korean peninsula unified under a pro-US democracy—is unattractive
both economically and strategically.
So I was rather
nonplussed—actually I felt kind of stupid, mingled with the queasy suspicion that
I had committed a floater before a worldwide audience--when Sinocism posted a
link to a Financial Times op-ed by a CCP theorist, Deng Yuwen, titled China should abandon North Korea.
However, not to
worry. Deng apparently fills the
reformer/contrarian seat as deputy editor at Study Times, a journal of the CCP’s
Central Party School.
He is an active op-ed
presence in the Chinese domestic media and achieved a certain notoriety when
his lengthy critical appraisal of the Hu Jintao era—Legacy of the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabao Regime
--was posted at Caijing and then got yanked.
Deng plows the familiar if admirable furrow of between-the-lines reformers,
as can be gleaned from a translation by Eric Mu of Danwei of the “ten challenges” that Hu and Wen left for the
incoming team.
In other words, his
op-ed is probably an outlier and not reflective of CCP policy, as is indicated
by the anxious look over the shoulder flavor of the “next best thing” hedging
in his last paragraph:
Considering these arguments, China should consider
abandoning North Korea. The best way of giving up on Pyongyang is to take the
initiative to facilitate North Korea’s unification with South Korea...
The next best thing would be to use China’s influence to
cultivate a pro-Beijing government in North Korea, to give it security
assurances, push it to give up nuclear weapons and start moving towards the
development path of a normal country.
Having said that, the
fact that Deng placed the piece in the Financial Times in the first place is an
indication of the impatience that Chinese reformers feel about the North Korean
alliance in particular and, one assumes, the CCP’s resistance to a more
accommodative stance toward the US and its “responsible stakeholder” priorities
in general.
[This piece appeared at Asia Times Online on February 22, 2013. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]
North Korean nukes: A useful stage device
By Peter Lee
In a time of leadership transition in both countries, the US is
dangling "responsible stakeholder" bait in front of China on North
Korea. However, there appears to be a muted but fierce debate inside
the US foreign policy community on how to make the bait tempting
enough for the People's Republic of China (PRC) leadership to bite.
The inconvenient and irritating character of the North Korean nuclear and missile program is apparently something that
everyone, with the natural exception of the DPRK
(Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea) leadership, can
agree on.
Therefore, the idea is frequently bandied about that
the PRC should exercise its unequalled leverage over the DPRK and
institute the embargo on food, fuel oil, international banking
facilities, or overall trade that will bring the North Korean regime
to its knees, if not to its senses.
Evan Osnos of the New Yorker singlehandedly transported
this idea into the bizarro quadrant with his suggestion that the PRC
deploy its cutting-edge hacking abilities to inflict a "Stuxnet"-style
attack on North Korea's nuclear facilities.
This apparently was not a passing fancy on the part
of Osnos. He diligently canvassed various pundits on this clever
scheme, only to be met with the
politest of rebuffs.
Beyond the lack of a law of war/imminent threat
justification for a pre-emptive cyberattack - something which does not
exercise the American commentariat overmuch in this post-Stuxnet day
and age - the flaw in this, and any other "PRC cuts the DPRK off at
the knees" strategy can be revealed by a brief consideration of the
consequences of a financial or material embargo under two likely
scenarios:
First scenario:
DPRK resists but quickly collapses. South Korea takes
over most or all of the peninsula, seizes the economic opportunities
now monopolized by the PRC, supplants Japan as the region's
pro-Western economic and military powerhouse and frontline democracy
on China's doorstep.
Second scenario:
DPRK survives but harbors a natural and undying
enmity against the PRC. It reaches out to the US and ROK. Through
collapse or unification, South Korea takes over most or all of the
peninsula, seizes the economic opportunities now monopolized by the
PRC, supplants Japan as the region's pro-Western economic and military
powerhouse and frontline democracy on China's doorstep.
The PRC had a chance to consider these extremely
attractive options in 2010, when the DPRK allegedly sank the
Cheonan,
and China was invited to join the United States and the ROK (Republic
of Korea, South Korea) in a concerted beat-down of North Korea
through a UN sanctions process.
Then president Hu Jintao decided he preferred an
alternate future in which North Korea remained a profitable
quasi-province, useful buffer, and sphere of influence, and was
excoriated by President Obama for "willful blindness" for his inability
to see things the right i.e. US way.
Will incoming president Xi Jinping see things any differently?
There are certainly rumblings by China's more
sophisticated foreign affairs pundits that the PRC should abandon the
"Pariahs R Us" model of foreign affairs, which appears to be crumbling
as Myanmar sidles into the Western camp, Sudan becomes a bifurcated
basket case, and the Iranian economy is ground down by sanctions.
The Western press has seized on these remarks, as
well as mutterings by some of China's notorious "netizens", who
apparently feel that the honor of the Chinese nation is soiled when it
is summoned to leap to the defense of Kim Jung-eun's embarrassingly
grubby and dysfunctional regime.
At the same time, the Obama administration appears to
be enticing the incoming Xi Jinping leadership team with visions of a
reset in the generally fraught US-PRC relationship.
The PRC is regarding the prospects under incoming US
Secretary of State John Kerry with some optimism. Secretary Kerry, who
as Senator Kerry was a front-line advocate of normalization of
relations with Vietnam, seems more inclined to take a "glass half full"
rather than "glass half empty" view of the PRC's socialist
shortcomings in democracy, human rights, and open markets.
There is some hope that the selection of John Kerry
reflects President Obama's desire for a correction away from the
antagonism and relentless friction that characterized Hillary Clinton's
pursuit of the pivot.
A Xinhua stemwinder speculated:
Some
analysts believe that Obama is now trying to rectify [former
secretary of state Hillary Clinton's] "extreme" behavior toward China,
and "fine tune" the "rebalancing" policy. Kerry becomes the best
person to act in this regard because of his moderate conduct style [1]
. As
the Obama administration has entered its second term - and the China
slots at the National Security Council, State Department, and the
Department of Defense have not been definitively filled - the US
government has been less inclined to get into China's face on the
myriad points of friction between the two powers.
The
United States has been conspicuously passive in observing the current
exercise in Senkaku brinksmanship, confining itself to urging both
parties to step back and lessen tensions, and largely ignoring the
spectacular economic and diplomatic mugging that Japan has suffered at
the hands of the PRC.
In a
discrete olive branch, the US national security apparatus let it be
known that it was downgrading the PRC from a "Priority One" to "Priority
Two" espionage target, rather counterintuitively it would seem, given
the heightened emphasis on Chinese hacking, thereby eliciting
howls of dismay from US defense hawks.
Also, the US State Department went out of its way to invoke the
six-party "group", made up of the Koreas, China, the US, Russia and
Japan, if not the "talks" as the forum for discussions with North
Korea. This was in sharp contrast to 2010 circumstances, where the US
and ROK joined forces to bypass the PRC and take the
Cheonan issue to the UN Security Council instead.
From the February 12 press briefing:
You
know that we've all said for quite some time that the Chinese have
the most influence within the six-party group. That's obvious given
their well-intermeshed economic relationship with the DPRK. That's
why, among other reasons, it's so important for us to stay closely
linked up with China, and why the Secretary's made it a priority to
work well with his new Chinese counterpart. [2]
The
message seems to be that Xi Jinping is being given the chance to take a
leadership role on the DPRK account and show the world it can make
some progress on the intractable North Korean issue, thereby allowing
the PRC to accrue some "responsible stakeholder" cred.
Unfortunately, the North Korean issue is something of a poisoned chalice
for the PRC. The DPRK's missile and nuclear weapons shenanigans are
transparently intended to enable direct engagement with the United
States, not reinforce Chinese suzerainty.
If
the United States withholds engagement with through the six-party
talks until the PRC is able to wring some gratifying concession out of
the DPRK, Chinese initiatives for restraining North Korean
adventurism are probably going to go nowhere and do little to enhance
the PRC's regional prestige or "responsible stakeholder" credentials.
Furthermore, denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is not seen by
China as a gigantic win that itself justifies the risks.
Over
at the Washington Post, Max Fisher tried to boil down the Chinese
objectives for North Korea to six little words: "no war, no
instability, no nukes". Having delivered this concise aphorism,
unfortunately, Fisher had to spend a considerable part of the article
shoehorning "no nukes" into the fact that China has demonstrated little
determination to
compel the DPRK to denuclearize.
To
the contrary, as Professor Cai Jian of Fudan University told Korea
Times, there are signs that the PRC is resigning itself to the
existence of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons power.
"So,
now there is a debate in China that we should be realistic with the
changed situation and focus our attention on how to manage Pyongyang's
nuclear weapons, instead of preventing it from developing them, which
is already a lost cause," Cai said.
Another Chinese analyst with a state-run think tank in Beijing echoed
the view. "Look. How many of China's neighboring countries have nuclear
weapons? India has them. Pakistan has them. Russia has them too. So,
China doesn't give too much attention to whether North Korea is a
nuclear state or not," he said on condition of anonymity.
"China can accept another neighbor who has nuclear weapons," he added.
[3]
Actually, the PRC's position might be better described with five
little words: "What's in it for me?" In the world of quid pro quo
diplomacy, President Xi might expect some concessions in return for
taking the risky and destabilizing step of compelling North Korea to
denuclearize.
However, it is difficult to imagine the Obama administration giving
China the kind of benefit it really wants: acknowledgement of the
PRC's regional hegemon status by support of China's bilateral approach
in its negotiations with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over the
various island disputes.
That
is because multilateralizing the maritime disputes to create a
fundamental security role for the US in East Asia is baked into the
"pivot"strategy, and a turn away from the pivot to a more situational
and less confrontational approach to US-China relations would be
viewed as strategic backsliding.
There are distinct signs of a foreign policy debate on whether it is
better to extort compliance or solicit cooperation from the PRC, one
that President Obama's outgoing team still seems determined to win.
Even
though Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, one of the
creators of the "pivot" to Asia (though he prefers the term
"rebalancing") is on the way out (actually on the way over to his old
perch at the "Center for a New American Security"), he gave China's -
and Secretary Kerry's - diplomats some food for thought by sharing his
views on "core interests" in an "exit interview" with Asahi Shimbun:
Q:
Back in November 2009, when President Obama visited China, a historic
phrase was inserted in the joint statement: "The two sides agreed that
respecting each other's core interests is extremely important." But
this reference to "core interests" disappeared from the next joint
statement, when China's president, Hu Jintao, visited the United
States in January 2011. What happened?
A:
I believe that the concept of "core interest" is subject to much
misunderstanding and has led to fairly serious tensions between the
United States and China. The idea that if a country declares an area a
"core interest," then somehow it is no longer a subject for
discussion with other countries, I don't think that approach is very
effective in 21st-century diplomacy. [4]
This
passage undoubtedly elicited some thoughtful annotation at the PRC's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Traditionally, "core interests" has been the foundation of the PRC's
foreign policy. Taiwan and Tibet - and resistance to any independence
talk - are "core interests" that any interlocutor is expected to
respect.
There was a gruesome blowup of the "core interests" debate during the
first
annus horribilis of US-PRC relations, 2010.
The
US diplomatic team told reporters that the PRC has extended the "core
interest" formulation to the South China Sea, which was taken as an
assertion by the aggressive PRC hegemon that it would use military force
to advance its claims - and provided the pretext for US injection
into the South China Seas (SCS) island disputes at ASEAN.
The
situation was considerably muddied by the facts that the PRC never
publicly affirmed the application of the doctrine to the SCS, was
committed to freedom of navigation and bilateral approach on SCS
issues (as opposed to the "outside interference" it absolutely rejects
in its traditional "core interest" areas of Tibet and Taiwan), and
had previously attempted to repurpose "core interests" as a statement
of priorities (like economic development) which the PRC hoped would be
respected by the international community, as opposed to red lines that
China would absolutely not brook being crossed.
Regardless of its scope and subtleties, the PRC's "core interest"
formulation seems to be anathema to the Obama administration, which
hangs its hat on "norms-based" or "rules-based" diplomacy, by which
respect for all "core interests" - including that PRC bugbear,
"sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs of other states"
- are conditional upon adherence to "core principles", such as
democracy, open markets, freedom to connect, and so on.
I,
for one, wonder if Secretary of State John Kerry is more inclined to
the traditional horse-trading approach to diplomacy implied by the
"core interest" formulation, as opposed to the "rule-based" absolutes
that obsessed former former secretary Hilary Clinton and, I believe,
preoccupy President Obama in his quest to make sense of the world and
define a leadership role for the United States within it.
Maybe Kurt Campbell's statement should be seen as a shot across
Secretary Kerry's bow, as well as China's, to declare that
reaffirmation and possible expansion of the "core interest"
formulation is a creeping challenge to the "core principle" that the
US should repudiate.
"Core interest" pushback was also central to an earnest op-ed penned
by Nina Hachigian at the Center for American Progress, another
sympathetic think tank, to guide secretary Kerry (in addition to
invoking the guidance of pivot great helmswoman Clinton, it helpfully
included a draft speech for Kerry to deliver to the Chinese,
accurately but presumably inadvertently reproducing the eye-glazing
prose with which "Big John" delivers his thoughts):
Many
analysts in China are working to give content to Xi's call for a new
type of great-power relationship. Some preliminary ideas center on
calling on the United States to halt actions - such as selling arms to
Taiwan - that infringe on China's "core" national security interests.
While visions based on dramatic changes to longstanding US policy are
not likely to fly in Washington, the Obama administration would do
well to offer its own ideas of what could work as a future vision of
US-China relations.
The
Obama administration's suggestion could begin with this: A peaceful
future is one in which the United States and China, along with the
other major powers, are embedded in a web of laws, norms, and
institutions. Such an international architecture can draw boundaries
around the two nations' natural rivalry.
When
each side is sure that the rules are fair and followed, competition
need not be hostile. Forums for dispute resolution - such as the one in
the World Trade Organization - can channel frictions. And
collaboration will be easier when both countries know that they are
shouldering a fair share of the burden along with other nations.
The
basis for this future vision lies very clearly in the ground that the
Obama administration has already laid. Secretary Clinton has
articulated many times the importance of a rules-based system and how
important China's support for it is.
In
evaluating who will have the upper hand in US China policy, it should
be remembered that the conciliatory, somewhat pompous Kerry was
President Obama's second choice for secretary of state.
The
first choice was United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, champion of the
Libyan intervention, advocate of a broader interpretation of R2P
("responsibility to protect"), and all-round scold of the PRC and
other authoritarian misfits at the UN.
Ambassador Rice fell victim to the confirmation process - and the
Republican compulsion to demonstrate to its traditional white base that,
if it could not defeat Obama in the presidential election, it could
at least deny some other black person a high government office.
When
Rice withdrew, Obama called on Kerry, who was unopposable, not
necessarily because of his whiteness or his congenial policy views,
but because of his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and his ability to call on his Republican colleagues for
support.
Tea-leaf readers will draw their own conclusions about the closeness
of Obama and Kerry. For me, a perhaps telling detail was that Kerry
was chosen to impersonate Mitt Romney in the preparation for the first
(disastrous for Obama) presidential debate, but reportedly ended up
sounding more like Kerry - a politician famously in love with his own
voice and unwilling to end the romance by finishing a statement - than
the jittery, soundbite-scattering Romney.
If,
in his heart, President Obama blames Secretary Kerry for the near
catastrophic loss of his debate mojo, perhaps he will entertain the
secretary of state's councils but not necessarily heed them.
I
think that President Obama, a cerebral, intense, and rather remote man
who has never succeeded in establishing a rapport with the CCP
apparatchiks who run China, is very much in tune with Clinton's
aggressive, strategic approach to Asia embodied in the formulation of
the "pivot to Asia".
In
this case, the inducements that the Obama administration is willing to
offer for Chinese support on North Korea are probably negative:
cooperate on North Korea and we won't be as hard on you on the core
principles involved in the South China Sea, the Senkakus, intellectual
property, and cyberwarfare.
In
other words, if the anti-core interest view point prevails in the
White House, Secretary Kerry will be unable to deliver substantive
advantages to President Xi Jinping beyond the intangible psychic
benefits of having played by the rules.
That, it is safe to say, not the kind of payback that excites President
Xi.
Clearly, the Chinese foreign policy commentariat is already bracing
for a return to the bad old days typified by Obama's first term.
On
February 17, Xinhua ran a think piece that downplayed the PRC's role in
the North Korean nuclear issue, and belittled expectations that China
should be responsible for improving the DPRK's behavior: From "
Chinese experts see US-DPRK antagonism as root cause of nuke test":
The
United States should reflect seriously on the latest nuclear test of
the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), which was caused by
long-standing antagonism between the two countries, Chinese experts
said.
After the DPRK's nuclear test earlier this week, some Western media said
China's policy toward the country has proven to be a failure, a
straw-man fallacy refuted by Chinese experts and scholars.
Unless Kerry is able to convince Obama to make some major changes in
US policy, probably the only progress US-China policy will make is
backwards - back to the confrontational certainties of Obama's first
administration.
Notes:
1.
How will John Kerry deal with China?, CCTV, February 2, 2013.
2.
US State Dept Daily Press Briefing - February 12, 2013.
3.
China to acknowledge N. Korea as nuclear state, February 13, 2013.
4.
INTERVIEW/ Kurt Campbell: China should accept US enduring leadership role in Asia, February 9, 2013.
