N. Korean Threat Different for China

BEIJING —  China’s reaction to North Korea’s nuclear test announcement early this week was unusually swift and forceful. Within hours, the normally slow-to-react Chinese government characterized Pyongyang’s action as hanran, meaning brazen, a term generally reserved for its worst enemies.

By midweek, however, China was sounding more like its old self: calling for dialogue, eschewing confrontation and warning against comprehensive economic sanctions, even as it redoubled efforts to bring its longtime ally back to the negotiating table.

As North Korea’s top supplier of energy and food, Beijing is viewed as the key to a tough international response at the United Nations to North Korea’s declared nuclear test Monday in defiance of Security Council warnings. And Washington argues that China must be a “responsible stakeholder” if it wants a leading role in international politics.

But with its go-slow stance, Beijing has been exposed to criticism that it is squandering a golden opportunity to display global leadership.

The problem, analysts say, is that China draws much different conclusions than Washington, even in the middle of a nuclear crisis, because it has a very different idea of what’s important and what it needs to prosper.

Whereas the U.S. and Europe view a nuclear North Korea as a fundamental threat to the global order, China sees it less as a problem in its own right than as a catalyst for other headaches, including the possible destabilization of the Korean peninsula and militarization of Japan.

“America wants to see North Korea go away, representing the final victory of the Cold War,” said Alexandre Mansourov, a security expert with the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “China’s interests, however, lie in keeping North Korea in place. China’s not doing this because it loves [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il, but because it wants the buffer to remain.”

Furthermore, Beijing appears to be less worried about a nuclear-armed North Korea.

“There’s a big perception gap,” said Jin Linbo, Asia-Pacific director at Beijing’s China Institute of International Studies. “China has a different assessment of the danger.”

Beijing already lives in a tough neighborhood where nuclear neighbors are abundant. It nearly went to war with a nuclear Soviet Union in the 1960s and more recently watched Pakistan and rival India join the club. China is not all that impressed by Pyongyang’s nuclear technology, analysts add, nor does it see itself as a potential target.

China’s position bears similarities to that of the U.S. from the Civil War to World War I, says Jin Canrong, vice dean of foreign relations at People’s University in Beijing. It is industrializing rapidly, weathering a huge population shift from rural to urban areas and is grappling with enormous social problems related to rising expectations and a widening wealth gap.

In the same way America was primarily isolationist as it focused on internal development, China seeks enough time and international stability to lift its people out of poverty, ease societal stresses and keep enough money flowing to maintain the Communist Party’s monopoly.

A bigger danger than North Korean nuclear weapons from China’s perspective is Washington destabilizing the region. Beijing apparently believes it needs North Korea as a buffer against the 30,000 or so U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to guard against an attack by Kim.

China, along with Russia, fears that sanctions could lead to a change of government in Pyongyang and growing U.S. influence close to home. Sanctions presaged the U.S.-led NATO removal of President Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia and the 2003 invasion of Iraq that unseated President Saddam Hussein.

Moreover, if Kim fell, the risk of refugees flooding across the border into China is a frightening economic and social prospect.

Also weighing on China’s mind is a fear that precipitate action could disrupt its courtship of South Korea, analysts say. If the Pyongyang government collapses in the near future in the wake of sanctions or direct military action, the United States would retain significant influence over a Seoul-dominated Korean peninsula. Keeping Kim in place, on the other hand, could eventually see both Koreas in China’s camp.

“South Korea is the big prize in all of this,” said Ralph Cossa, executive director of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Since relations between Beijing and Seoul were normalized in 1992, China has watched approvingly as anti-American sentiment has grown in South Korea, U.S. troop levels have declined, China has supplanted the United States as Seoul’s largest trading partner and trendy young Koreans have dropped their English-language classes in droves to study Mandarin. A sign of China’s growing confidence is its support for South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon as the next U.N. secretary-general. A decade ago, Beijing would have condemned a similar nominee as a U.S. puppet.

None of which is to say that Pyongyang doesn’t infuriate Beijing. Despite receiving much of its food and an estimated 70% of its energy from China, North Korea is often ungrateful and defiant, knowing that China’s interests would be hurt by its collapse. The way Pyongyang sees it, analysts say, Beijing merely writes the checks while it is doing the heavy lifting in the front-line battle against what the two governments perceive to be Western imperialists.

North Korea has also timed its outbursts with seeming disregard for its giant neighbor.

Its 1998 missile launch over Japan’s main island of Honshu boosted Japanese public support for a U.S. missile defense plan, hurting Beijing’s interests.

Pyongyang’s February 2005 announcement of reactivated nuclear activity, in the middle of Chinese New Year, infuriated Beijing officials who were forced to cut short their holiday.

And the announcement of the nuclear test Monday morning occurred during one of the most important political events on the Chinese calendar -- the Communist Party’s four-day Central Committee meeting.

Chinese leaders, with their love of pageantry, don’t like tearing up their domestic or foreign scripts. The declared test by Beijing’s mercurial neighbor not only overshadowed the meeting but discredited President Hu Jintao’s main foreign policy initiative: six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, involving the U.S., South Korea, Russia and Japan in addition to China and North Korea.

Beijing’s biggest nightmare emerging from the crisis would be a nuclear Japan, although it remains confident that won’t happen given divisions in Japanese society and Washington’s fears that such a development would spur a regional arms race.

Though Beijing sees far less danger in a nuclear North Korea than does Washington, it remains under pressure to bring its stance somewhat more in line with the U.S. position. Too many other countries are angry, and Pyongyang’s defiance threatens to embolden other nations aspiring to become nuclear powers, undercutting the global stability China needs to grow and prosper internally. Nor can Beijing afford to alienate the Americans, its biggest customers, by appearing too cozy with Pyongyang.

China apparently also figures it would have more influence by supporting and watering down a U.N. sanctions resolution than it would through outright opposition. Seoul and Beijing both know that North Korea can take more punishment right now: The fall harvest gives the impoverished country some breathing room.

This all leaves Beijing seeking an equilibrium closer to the U.S. position but not so close that it deals a death blow to Kim’s government.

Adding to China’s lumbering pace this week, analysts say, is its cumbersome decision-making system. Because policy for centuries has been made by a tiny elite behind closed doors, the system can fall short during periods of rapid change as other parts of the government await directives handed down from on high.

Beijing has certainly taken more global responsibility, as seen by its recent decision to send 1,000 peacekeeping troops to Lebanon. By and large, however, it tries to avoid getting entangled in too many overseas commitments, in keeping with its multi-decade game plan.

“China measures history in centuries, not the next quarter,” said Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies. “There’s a notion that China will play out an American scenario, but they don’t see it that way. They have a very different national interest.”

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Yin Lijin in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.