It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Xi Jinping wonders in the run-up to the historic United States-North Korea summit what exactly Donald Trump’s gameplan might be.
Mr Trump may expect Kim Jong-un to contain China as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai contained the Soviet Union after the seven days in China in 1972 that Richard Nixon called “the week that changed the world”. Another explanation is that having signally failed to live up to his pledge to end American involvement abroad, Mr Trump hopes a diplomatic coup might enable him to attack Iran, thereby earning domestic, Saudi Arabian and Israeli applause. Convinced that his policy of political pressure and economic sanctions bent North Korea to his will, he might also aspire to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize.
The two-day visit to Pyongyang by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, certainly demonstrated interest in — if not concern about — the meeting and its possible outcome. For now, North Korea has vowed to deepen strategic relations with China. According to the Chinese foreign ministry, Mr Kim, who made a surprise trip to Beijing in March, assured Mr Wang that a strong relationship with China was “a firm strategy” for North Korea. In turn, Beijing, which accounts for more than 90 per cent of North Korea’s trade, pledged further economic support.
Despite providing generous economic and political support for seven decades, China is not very keen on North Korea developing nuclear weapons. Hence its endorsement, albeit not every enthusiastically, of United Nations sanctions to deny Pyongyang critical foreign currency from selling coal, minerals, seafood and garments. But there are also signs of China quietly taking steps to connect North Korea to northeast Asian road and rail networks via the Belt and Road Initiative. Some UN-imposed restrictions are being relaxed, and reports suggest that North Korean workers are returning to bordering Chinese districts on short-term visas. Other reports indicate China is studying ways of increasing economic cooperation without violating UN resolutions.
China might accept its protégé becoming economically more independent but not in cooperation with the United States. Friction over trade and the American threat of unspecified “consequences” for “militarising the South China Sea” underline Washington’s role as China’s principal adversary. Outwardly, the Chinese have little to worry about.But they are aware that having emerged from seclusion, Mr Kim might find international diplomacy a heady experience.
Beijing was miffed, for instance, at being excluded from several items in the joint declaration issued at the end of Mr Kim’s meeting with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, which mentioned “trilateral or quadrilateral” talks. Trilateral would mean North and South Korea and the US but not China, which sent millions of troops (withdrawn in 1958) to fight for North Korea during the war which ravaged the peninsula from 1950 to 1953. The Chinese must have been gratified to learn that Mr Kim suggested quadrilateral talks, but he didn’t invite China to send observers to the destruction of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site close to the Chinese border. Instead, he promised to invite South Korean and American experts, although the latter dismiss the proposed closure as a propaganda gesture with little impact on nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. The two Koreas have also promised to start talks with Washington to negotiate a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War.
These snubs to China are all the more significant because top-level visits between the two countries were frequent under Mr Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung. Even his father, Kim Jong-il, made seven trips to China between 2000 and 2011. Such travel stopped only after the young Kim Jong-un came to power and reportedly ordered the elimination of senior officials suspected of being close to Beijing.
Repeating history, the Kim-Moon summit reca-lled June 14, 2000 when South Korea’s then President, Kim Dae-jung, travelled to Pyong-yang for a landmark meeting with Kim Jong-il. That was the year when Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, became the most senior American official to visit North Korea since the Korean War, and the US and North Korea began a negotiating process aimed at preventing nuclear weapons being developed on the peninsula. Few believed in 2000 that the 38th parallel militarised border between North and South would crumble like the Berlin Wall. Few now believe that unification is around the corner. But just as Kim Dae-jung won the Nobel Peace Prize, 18 Republican Congress-men now want the Nobel Committee to award this year’s prize to Mr Trump for “his tireless work to bring peace to our world”.
As we know, nothing came of the 2000 peace initiatives. The talks dragged on for the rest of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but the disclosure of North Korea’s uranium enrichment programme prompted George W. Bush to cancel the effort. In 2002 Pyongyang expelled international inspectors and restarted its nuclear facilities. Mr Kim had already promised to suspend his nuclear programme and invest in the economy even before he and Mr Moon agreed to officially end the war and work for the “complete denuclearisation” of the peninsula.
Many remain sceptical about whether he will fulfil these commitments. Many others wonder whether Mr Trump will give him the chance to do so. Not surprisingly, Mr Kim saw the menacing 10-day “Ulchi Freedom Guardian” joint US-South Korean military exercise between the land, sea and air forces of the two nations as provocative muscle-flexing. Despite recent media reports of conciliatory moves in the US, Mr Trump says that withdrawing troops is “not on the table”. That means some 140,000 American military personnel will remain permanently in the Korean peninsula, Japan and Guam. Mr Kim will remain understandably nervous until Mr Trump and Mr Moon take steps to reduce their militarism.
