CHIRONY

Following the collapse of the Six-Party Talks, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi announced yesterday that China would welcome the US to engage in direct talks with North Korea. This comes as no surprise.

China’s only real objective in North Korea is stability, and trying to prevent a sudden, overwhelming addition to its already massive and floating migrant population. Despite the perception that Beijing is all buddy-buddy with Pyongyang, I doubt that Chinese cadres have any love for the attention-crazed Kim Jong Il. There are perhaps some nostalgic sympathies, but nothing more. China knows that continued hostilities from North Korea add tension and instability to relations in North Asia, particularly as Japan begins to seriously consider nuclear armament. Stability is the name of the game in China, and North Korea is about as stable as the Dear Leader’s physical health.

For China, the best long-term solution in North Korea is neither reunification nor a complete political upheaval, but rather for the country to embark on a China-like economic liberalization process. Given the seemingly unremitting paranoia in Pyongyang, I don’t think this will happen any time soon. So China will continue to provide aid and do its best to keep the matches away from the powder-keg. But if North Korea persists on its present, provocative course – to the point where Japan, South Korea, the US, and the EU consider aggressive military action – China will be forced to consider withdrawing all economic and nutritional aid, the consequences of which could be a complete political collapse in the heavily-militarized North Korea and humanitarian catastrophe.

In China’s eyes there is no reason to expedite this process or to beg the question. In the long run, North Korea really only has one way to avoid collapse: peaceful economic liberalization. Even if this doesn’t happen in the tenure of Kim Jong Il, China will happily delay the chaos with hopes for the eventual ascension of more progressive and open-minded leaders. Assuming that the Dear Leader never dies, or that his like-minded compatriots never relinquish power, China is happy to delay the inevitable as long as the costs of propping-up North Korea are less than the price of a complete political meltdown.

In the meantime, why not let the US have a crack at re-enrolling the petulant hellion in the global institution? Anything to keep him from hurling eggs at cars and torturing the neighbor’s cat.