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This is continual posturing from the Chinese government. They’re incentivized to retain the DPRK or risk a humanitarian crisis on their border. As long as North

This is continual posturing from the Chinese government. They’re incentivized to retain the DPRK or risk a humanitarian crisis on their border. As long as North Korea doesn’t destabilize the region itself, China will continue to prop them up. If you’re interested in this topic, read “The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia” by Andrei Lankov.

QAPereo 9y ago
It is a profoundly difficult situation to manage, because of course if the DPRK is utterly destroyed then they lose their border which currently has over 15 million ethnic North Koreans living it. To say the Chinese central authorities are primarily concerned with central governmental control would be an understatement. If the DPRK isn’t destroyed, but occupied by South Korea/United States that would be almost as bad or maybe even worse. Pretty much the last thing they want is to be completely surrounded by us. They feel they have to play this very specific game in which the DPRK is maintained as a credible threat, but not so immidiate a threat that anyone just crushes them including the Chinese themselves. All of this in the context in which the North Koreans don’t particularly like or respect the Chinese and vice versa. I can’t believe that this balancing act will work forever.
- yladiz 9y ago
  The US doesn’t surround China at all. The only possible highly US friendly border would be a unified Korea, and while some other countries have diplomatic ties to the US they are not strong allies, for example some post Soviet counties like Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Also there aren’t really ‘ethnic North Koreans’, just ethnic Koreans. The border doesn’t affect the ethnicity in that way, because if anyone from North or South Korea did an ancestry test it would just say ‘Korean’ or ‘Korean peninsula’.
  - samstave 9y ago
    Naive question: If shit went down with DPRK and the US, wouldn't china aggressively go after their other interests: Taiwan and Hong Kong with an iron fist, putting the US at a stalemate because now china controls 90% of the worlds information technology manufacturing capacity - this the US is fucked and would never start to attack troops in Taiwan and Hong Kong else literally kill the entire worlds non-Agra infra? So, with the ineptitude of trump, if I were playing Risk, and I were China, I'd play that card immediately. Just invade Taiwan and HK with massive troops, but do it as a peaceful occupation, and just take control of all banking and manufacture outbound and then the US would just have to say "darnit, what do you want" and the tides of the next century flip to China's favor. Conspiracy theory time: This is one of the reasons the US heavily funds MIC tech from Israel, the tech innovation coming from there with the subsidies and the closeness are massive - and they aren't china... so they have been focusing on exact and precise cyber weapons instead of massive production volume. If the "weapon" is a small scale team of cyber warfare experts with incredible tools built with unlimited funding, and they don't even sit in Israel - then taking them out will be much harder. As opposed to bombing a plastic widget factory in china... Heck. - they are prolly on a secret USs Jimmy carter sister sub with undersea vampire taps already... We have a strategic reserve of oil, I'm sure we have a strategic reserve of Silicon Valley components which were made in china to keep up various operations..
    - adventured 9y ago
      > now china controls 90% of the worlds information technology manufacturing capacity - this the US is fucked and would never start to attack troops in Taiwan and Hong Kong else literally kill the entire worlds non-Agra infra? Your scenario is pretty absurd considering history. If it were necessary, the US could build a hundred plus factories in the next year to churn out whatever IT technology was needed for its domestic well-being (in an extreme scenario where it was literally cut off). The US has hundreds of leading tech companies with the specialized knowledge required to do so, and a long history of pulling off incredible feats of industry when pressed to do so. It has an existing massive manufacturing capacity (China only passed the US in manufacturing output in 2011-2012), that comes in all shapes and sizes. The US also has the banks, private capital, public capital markets, entrepreneurs, thousands of technology companies (including most of the largest tech companies on the planet), accumulated decades of IT knowledge among the laborforce, the universities (R&D, science capability, tech labs, whatever the US could possibly need), a huge tech labor pool, any commodities needed, and the global reserve currency - all of which would be put to use. The US can marshal its vast resources when required, it has proven that repeatedly.
      - samstave 9y ago
        Your answer sounds good on official US paper... but this isnt WWII - and China has a billion potential slaves to do whatever it wants. The US doesnt have those potential slaves... I know that yours is likely the accepted scenario to the US government, but I look around at my economy in San Francisco - every single object within 5 miles of me has been at least partially made in China. With a very small exception to certain things. Sure, we can locally source our artisan recovery with organic planks, but if you're expecting the US to instantly turn out massive scale of anything other than food, I dont think it will happen. Now, thats not to say we dont have incredible allies who can produce a massive amount of components and materials needed - but Target and Walmart are going to be empty in weeks. All laptops and cellphones stop flowing into the US. Server and networking components that arent made in china, but are required for final assembly are dead. Christ, recall the Tsunami knocking out global hard-drive supplies? Yeah, you're comment is just as absurdly inflated.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I agree with you on literally all points, but critically the PRC does not. As for ethnicity, I agree as well, but the North doesn’t really. I’d strongly recommend The Cleanest Race by Brian Reynolds-
BartSaM 9y ago
I really think that the humanitarian problem is not a real problem for China. A country this size could easily swallow 10 million Koreans (let's be real, surely not more than half of population would flee), allow them to work and assimilate and not even notice it really. I think the issue is that China is afraid that united Korea will become a US ally and allow US forces to station there. Also it could expose China to the world as a weak player that could not handle Korea by itself.
- opportune 9y ago
  I've never understood this argument. South Korea is already a US ally, and I don't see how the land of North Korea is more strategically beneficial than South Korea already is. It's not like the US needs to be directly bordering China to be able to launch missiles there or to spy on them. I think you are right that there is a "prestige" factor to this as well. China doesn't want to lose an ally, regardless of whether having that ally benefits them much, because they would look weak backing down to the US.
  - BartSaM 9y ago
    Land border attracts tensions. It's also a psychological factor. Then it is much harder to launch an invasion from the sea, than from land. Its same as saying that there is no difference if Cuba will be "east" aligned and have USSR army/nukes or Mexico - after all, it is easy enough to launch nukes from both places. You think from a "nuke" perspective. There are much more perspectives, like controlling water borders, locking important Chinese ports etc.
odiroot 9y ago
Both sides would be smart to delay any diplomatic actions before the National Congress in China is over. Now is the "election season" in the middle kingdom.
adventured 9y ago
It has never been about a concern over a humanitarian crisis on their border. In regards to North Korea, that's trivial for China. They have 300+ million people living on just a few dollars per day. They could absorb 5-10 million more and not notice in the least. It's about preventing the unification of Korea and allowing the US military to get closer to China's territory. That's a double loss as far as China is concerned strategically. The situation has an easy solution. China collapses North Korea as it exists today and pays off all the military leadership (which actually runs the country); said military cabal gets to live in China, and doesn't get prosecuted for war crimes (all obvious requirements from their perspective). The US, South Korea and China put together an initial trillion dollar, 20 year, package for economic recovery. The US & South Korea agree to cede between 1/3 and 1/2 of North Korea to China, to be used as a form of territory buffer between the US / S.Korea and China. The US agrees not to position its troops any closer to Chinese territory (ie not to occupy any of the territory South Korea acquires), various rules could be put into place that everyone agrees upon to ease China's concerns. This is a trivial problem to solve as far as the big problems of the past century go. What's not trivial, is that North Korea's nuclear & missile technology is going to keep pushing forward, which will eventually spur the US / Russia / China to begin aggressively pushing their nuclear technology forward again. Further, North Korea will attempt to hand their nuclear technology to other nations, as there are no real consequences for them doing so (oh no, more sanctions), only the benefit of spreading nukes around further which lessens the spotlight on them.
- Fej 9y ago
  It is possible to determine, after a nuclear explosion, to determine from whence the weapon was produced. You'd better believe that such a discovery would be an extreme casus belli for an invasion. North Korea isn't interested in proliferation. They want (and have) nukes to keep the United States at bay. Historically, the US has no problem attacking states without nuclear weapons but never does so to states with them. It's a good strategy.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > North Korea isn't interested in proliferation. Of course they're extremely interested in proliferation. Just as Pakistan, China, India, France, Israel, Britain and Russia were all interested in proliferation (insofar as it suited their interests) and for exactly the same reason. The only reason the USSR and China got nukes in the first place, is they had a desperate self-interest in proliferation. North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons was also proliferation, which they were extremely interested in. North Korea would love nothing more than to give the US & Co. other nuclear problems to deal with. The more so called rogue nations (or really anybody would do) with nuclear weapons there are, the easier it is for North Korea to justify keeping theirs, the less unique the North Korea situation becomes, the less pressure there will be on North Korea to give their weapons up. If five new nations pop up with nuclear weapons, the premise of North Korea being a rogue nuclear entity loses most of its punch, and the sanctions would wilt accordingly.
fallingfrog 9y ago
I have to say that the set of scenarios in this opinion piece sound very optimistic- China taking over the north, followed by general peace and cessation of hostilities, sounds close to the best case scenario. The reality is likely to be far uglier- wars have a tendency to expand, spread, and escalate, and we would be extremely lucky if China and the US didn't come to blows, followed quickly by all their respective allies. Every war ever fought was supposed to be short, limited, and without a lot of casualties. That just never turns out to be the case.

QAPereo 9y ago

It is a profoundly difficult situation to manage, because of course if the DPRK is utterly destroyed then they lose their border which currently has over 15 million ethnic North Koreans living it. To say the Chinese central authorities are primarily concerned with central governmental control would be an understatement. If the DPRK isn’t destroyed, but occupied by South Korea/United States that would be almost as bad or maybe even worse. Pretty much the last thing they want is to be completely surrounded by us. They feel they have to play this very specific game in which the DPRK is maintained as a credible threat, but not so immidiate a threat that anyone just crushes them including the Chinese themselves. All of this in the context in which the North Koreans don’t particularly like or respect the Chinese and vice versa. I can’t believe that this balancing act will work forever.

yladiz 9y ago
The US doesn’t surround China at all. The only possible highly US friendly border would be a unified Korea, and while some other countries have diplomatic ties to the US they are not strong allies, for example some post Soviet counties like Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Also there aren’t really ‘ethnic North Koreans’, just ethnic Koreans. The border doesn’t affect the ethnicity in that way, because if anyone from North or South Korea did an ancestry test it would just say ‘Korean’ or ‘Korean peninsula’.
- samstave 9y ago
  Naive question: If shit went down with DPRK and the US, wouldn't china aggressively go after their other interests: Taiwan and Hong Kong with an iron fist, putting the US at a stalemate because now china controls 90% of the worlds information technology manufacturing capacity - this the US is fucked and would never start to attack troops in Taiwan and Hong Kong else literally kill the entire worlds non-Agra infra? So, with the ineptitude of trump, if I were playing Risk, and I were China, I'd play that card immediately. Just invade Taiwan and HK with massive troops, but do it as a peaceful occupation, and just take control of all banking and manufacture outbound and then the US would just have to say "darnit, what do you want" and the tides of the next century flip to China's favor. Conspiracy theory time: This is one of the reasons the US heavily funds MIC tech from Israel, the tech innovation coming from there with the subsidies and the closeness are massive - and they aren't china... so they have been focusing on exact and precise cyber weapons instead of massive production volume. If the "weapon" is a small scale team of cyber warfare experts with incredible tools built with unlimited funding, and they don't even sit in Israel - then taking them out will be much harder. As opposed to bombing a plastic widget factory in china... Heck. - they are prolly on a secret USs Jimmy carter sister sub with undersea vampire taps already... We have a strategic reserve of oil, I'm sure we have a strategic reserve of Silicon Valley components which were made in china to keep up various operations..
  - adventured 9y ago
    > now china controls 90% of the worlds information technology manufacturing capacity - this the US is fucked and would never start to attack troops in Taiwan and Hong Kong else literally kill the entire worlds non-Agra infra? Your scenario is pretty absurd considering history. If it were necessary, the US could build a hundred plus factories in the next year to churn out whatever IT technology was needed for its domestic well-being (in an extreme scenario where it was literally cut off). The US has hundreds of leading tech companies with the specialized knowledge required to do so, and a long history of pulling off incredible feats of industry when pressed to do so. It has an existing massive manufacturing capacity (China only passed the US in manufacturing output in 2011-2012), that comes in all shapes and sizes. The US also has the banks, private capital, public capital markets, entrepreneurs, thousands of technology companies (including most of the largest tech companies on the planet), accumulated decades of IT knowledge among the laborforce, the universities (R&D, science capability, tech labs, whatever the US could possibly need), a huge tech labor pool, any commodities needed, and the global reserve currency - all of which would be put to use. The US can marshal its vast resources when required, it has proven that repeatedly.
    - samstave 9y ago
      Your answer sounds good on official US paper... but this isnt WWII - and China has a billion potential slaves to do whatever it wants. The US doesnt have those potential slaves... I know that yours is likely the accepted scenario to the US government, but I look around at my economy in San Francisco - every single object within 5 miles of me has been at least partially made in China. With a very small exception to certain things. Sure, we can locally source our artisan recovery with organic planks, but if you're expecting the US to instantly turn out massive scale of anything other than food, I dont think it will happen. Now, thats not to say we dont have incredible allies who can produce a massive amount of components and materials needed - but Target and Walmart are going to be empty in weeks. All laptops and cellphones stop flowing into the US. Server and networking components that arent made in china, but are required for final assembly are dead. Christ, recall the Tsunami knocking out global hard-drive supplies? Yeah, you're comment is just as absurdly inflated.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I agree with you on literally all points, but critically the PRC does not. As for ethnicity, I agree as well, but the North doesn’t really. I’d strongly recommend The Cleanest Race by Brian Reynolds-

BartSaM 9y ago

I really think that the humanitarian problem is not a real problem for China. A country this size could easily swallow 10 million Koreans (let's be real, surely not more than half of population would flee), allow them to work and assimilate and not even notice it really. I think the issue is that China is afraid that united Korea will become a US ally and allow US forces to station there. Also it could expose China to the world as a weak player that could not handle Korea by itself.

opportune 9y ago
I've never understood this argument. South Korea is already a US ally, and I don't see how the land of North Korea is more strategically beneficial than South Korea already is. It's not like the US needs to be directly bordering China to be able to launch missiles there or to spy on them. I think you are right that there is a "prestige" factor to this as well. China doesn't want to lose an ally, regardless of whether having that ally benefits them much, because they would look weak backing down to the US.
- BartSaM 9y ago
  Land border attracts tensions. It's also a psychological factor. Then it is much harder to launch an invasion from the sea, than from land. Its same as saying that there is no difference if Cuba will be "east" aligned and have USSR army/nukes or Mexico - after all, it is easy enough to launch nukes from both places. You think from a "nuke" perspective. There are much more perspectives, like controlling water borders, locking important Chinese ports etc.

odiroot 9y ago

Both sides would be smart to delay any diplomatic actions before the National Congress in China is over. Now is the "election season" in the middle kingdom.

adventured 9y ago

It has never been about a concern over a humanitarian crisis on their border. In regards to North Korea, that's trivial for China. They have 300+ million people living on just a few dollars per day. They could absorb 5-10 million more and not notice in the least. It's about preventing the unification of Korea and allowing the US military to get closer to China's territory. That's a double loss as far as China is concerned strategically. The situation has an easy solution. China collapses North Korea as it exists today and pays off all the military leadership (which actually runs the country); said military cabal gets to live in China, and doesn't get prosecuted for war crimes (all obvious requirements from their perspective). The US, South Korea and China put together an initial trillion dollar, 20 year, package for economic recovery. The US & South Korea agree to cede between 1/3 and 1/2 of North Korea to China, to be used as a form of territory buffer between the US / S.Korea and China. The US agrees not to position its troops any closer to Chinese territory (ie not to occupy any of the territory South Korea acquires), various rules could be put into place that everyone agrees upon to ease China's concerns. This is a trivial problem to solve as far as the big problems of the past century go. What's not trivial, is that North Korea's nuclear & missile technology is going to keep pushing forward, which will eventually spur the US / Russia / China to begin aggressively pushing their nuclear technology forward again. Further, North Korea will attempt to hand their nuclear technology to other nations, as there are no real consequences for them doing so (oh no, more sanctions), only the benefit of spreading nukes around further which lessens the spotlight on them.

Fej 9y ago
It is possible to determine, after a nuclear explosion, to determine from whence the weapon was produced. You'd better believe that such a discovery would be an extreme casus belli for an invasion. North Korea isn't interested in proliferation. They want (and have) nukes to keep the United States at bay. Historically, the US has no problem attacking states without nuclear weapons but never does so to states with them. It's a good strategy.
- adventured 9y ago
  > North Korea isn't interested in proliferation. Of course they're extremely interested in proliferation. Just as Pakistan, China, India, France, Israel, Britain and Russia were all interested in proliferation (insofar as it suited their interests) and for exactly the same reason. The only reason the USSR and China got nukes in the first place, is they had a desperate self-interest in proliferation. North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons was also proliferation, which they were extremely interested in. North Korea would love nothing more than to give the US & Co. other nuclear problems to deal with. The more so called rogue nations (or really anybody would do) with nuclear weapons there are, the easier it is for North Korea to justify keeping theirs, the less unique the North Korea situation becomes, the less pressure there will be on North Korea to give their weapons up. If five new nations pop up with nuclear weapons, the premise of North Korea being a rogue nuclear entity loses most of its punch, and the sanctions would wilt accordingly.

fallingfrog 9y ago

I have to say that the set of scenarios in this opinion piece sound very optimistic- China taking over the north, followed by general peace and cessation of hostilities, sounds close to the best case scenario. The reality is likely to be far uglier- wars have a tendency to expand, spread, and escalate, and we would be extremely lucky if China and the US didn't come to blows, followed quickly by all their respective allies. Every war ever fought was supposed to be short, limited, and without a lot of casualties. That just never turns out to be the case.