The International Herald Tribune, October 26, 2011 Wednesday, BY CHOE
SANG-HUN
North Korea profits by a turn to Cold War allies;
Seoul fears its hard line has allowed China to seize economic opening
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DO – This is exactly where both
the U.S. and S. Korea fail in terms of their policy toward N. Korea. The policy
decision on N. Korea almost always comes down to China, China, and China.
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Pyongyang has leased piers to China and Russia,
sold mining
rights to the Chinese and built manufacturing outposts along
the border, where China can hire cheap North Korean labor.
In September, under the flags of North Korea and China, North Korean
workers began digging at Haesan, a hilly town near the Chinese border, kicking
off one of several joint mining ventures. On Oct. 13, a Russian train chugged
across the border to celebrate the restoration of a dilapidated Soviet-era rail
link between the Russian city of Khasan and the North Korean town of Rajin.
At Haesan, China acquires copper, one of the many abundant mineral
reserves lying next door waiting to be exploited. At Rajin, Russia wins access
to an ice-free port to export Siberian coal and take in Asian goods it wants to
transport to Europe. From both projects, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il,
counts cash.
These and other similar deals North Korea is striking with its two Cold
War-era allies, especially China, are creating a predicament for the South
Korean government.
Under its conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, South Korea has been trying
to teach North Korea a lesson, one he proudly reaffirmed with President Barack
Obama during their meeting in Washington this month: Pyongyang must not be
rewarded for its misconduct.
By antagonizing the North, however, Seoul is also pushing it deeper
into the embrace of Russia and particularly China, whose intentions Koreans
have always regarded with suspicion. As Mr. Lee approaches his final year in
office, a question that troubles many South Koreans is whether they have ''lost
North Korea.''
''There is widespread anxiety in South Korea - among government
officials, business leaders and the general public - that China is
quietly achieving the economic colonization of the North, thereby undermining
the long-term aspiration for Korean reunification and cutting Southern
companies out of the long-term profits to be made in North Korea,''
said John Delury, who teaches courses on North Korea-China relations at Yonsei
University in Seoul.
Mr. Delury does not agree that China is trying to block Korean reconciliation.
But, he said, ''it's hard to deny that the status quo - increasing economic
ties to China, while those between the two Koreas shrink - renders Seoul less
relevant to the question of North Korea's economic future.''
North Korea's longstanding strategy has been to play one bigger neighbor against another
as a way of extracting aid while maintaining its independence:
first the Soviet Union against China and then, after the Soviet collapse, China
against the United States and South Korea. That approach faltered as Washington
and Seoul responded to North Korea's nuclear test in 2009 and its attack on a
South Korean island last year with more trade embargoes, all at a time when Mr.
Kim has been dealing with ill health, a hungry populace and ensuring his young
son's succession as his political heir.
''He doesn't want domestic reforms. But he needs foreign currency to
sustain his regime,'' said Park Hyeong-jung at the Korea Institute for National
Unification in Seoul. ''His answer is diversifying his strategy of running his
country as a 'rentier state,' with now China as his main client.''
Mr. Kim has visited China four times since May 2010. Deal after deal
has followed: leasing Rajin piers to China and Russia; selling mining
rights to the Chinese; and building manufacturing outposts along the
border where China can hire cheap North Korean labor. Both sides are discussing
exporting North Korean workers to China, as the North already does to the
Middle East.
When Mr. Kim met with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia in August,
he agreed to allow a pipeline to pass through North Korea, for an
estimated fee of at least $150 million a year, so that Russia can export
natural gas to South Korea, one of the world's leading energy importers.
John S. Park, who directs Northeast Asia projects at the U.S. Institute
of Peace in Washington, called what has been happening between China and North
Korea ''China's Sunshine Policy.''
For 10 years, South Korea experimented with its own ''Sunshine Policy'' of
economic engagement with North Korea, until Mr. Lee took office in 2008.
''Their engagement activities with North Korea far outshine the
Sunshine Policy'' of South Korea, Mr. Park said of the Chinese. ''The caveat is
that these economic development projects are not teaching the North
Koreans market-economy
activities, but rather are the direct
result of political deals at the highest levels of the Communist
Party of China and the Workers' Party of Korea.''
''The careful and explicit warning from Beijing, though,'' he added,
''is that if North Korea provokes tensions on the Korean Peninsula that results
in a South Korea-U.S. military response, Beijing will not help it.''
On Monday, during a visit to Pyongyang, the Chinese vice prime
minister, Li Keqiang, urged North Korea to improve its strained ties with the
United States and South Korea, the Chinese state news media reported.
China shifted its policy following North Korea's 2009 nuclear test,
said David Straub, deputy director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research
Center at Stanford University in California. While China did not want North
Korea to continue developing nuclear weapons, its greater concern was that
U.S.-led economic sanctions might cause the Pyongyang regime to collapse or to
lash out against South Korea.
''Since China's own top
national priority is economic development - and for that, stability on the Korean Peninsula is
essential - Chinese policy makers have opted to double down on the
North Korea policy,'' Mr. Straub said.
China pressed all parties to return to talks to end North Korea's
nuclear arms program while reassuring the Pyongyang leadership with continuing
diplomatic support as it undergoes a delicate father-to-son power transfer. On
Oct. 19, a senior U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said that Washington, too, was employing ''a management strategy,''
engaging North Korea in bilateral talks because ''sometimes when engagement has
been broken off, it causes them to lash out in dangerous and unsettling ways.''
The most recent round of talks ended in Geneva on Tuesday, The
Associated Press reported. The U.S. envoy leading the talks, Stephen Bosworth,
said that the two days of talks had narrowed differences between the two sides,
but that no agreement was reached on formally resuming negotiations, either
bilaterally or in the so-called six-party format that also includes China,
Japan, Russia and South Korea.
China, which is hungry for natural resources, covets North Korea's
minerals. China's northeastern provinces, once among the poorest, are now
booming, and China is helping to develop the Rajin port to improve the region's
access to the sea.
''So Beijing applies roughly the same approach to North Korea that it
does with developing countries across the world: (1) trade where profitable,
(2) invest where strategic, and (3)
foster close state-to-state bilateral
relations,'' said Mr. Delury, the Yonsei University professor. ''Chinese
officials are increasingly vocal about spreading their model of 'reform and
opening' to North Korea. By Chinese standards, it's outright proselytizing.''
Today, along the border with North Korea, the Chinese are razing hills,
digging tunnels and erecting concrete columns across valleys, all to extend
roads and rail lines into North Korea. In Pyongyang, state-run television
broadcasts Chinese songs and praises China's economic miracle, though North
Korean defectors report an entrenched resentment, tinged with envy, among
ordinary people for China, which in the past often subjugated Korea.
During Mr. Li's visit to Pyongyang this week, China reported that its
trade with North Korea from January through July reached $3.1 billion, an 87
percent increase over the same period last year. China's portion of North
Korea's external trade rose from 39 percent in 2006 to 57 percent in 2010,
according to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency in Seoul. Half of the
$1.2 billion in North Korean exports to China last year were iron ore and coal.
For Pyongyang, Chinese investment has one major advantage: It is ''less
politically sensitive'' than investment from capitalist rivals like
South Korea, said Lee Hee-ok at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. ''But to
avoid being subjugated by China, North Korea will reach out to improve ties
with the United States, South Korea and Russia as a counterbalance.''
Last week, the South Korean foreign minister, Kim Sung-hwan, said,
''It's a good thing if North Korea learns economic development from China.''
Still, Chun Yung-woo, the national security adviser to Mr. Lee, voiced
a growing concern among South Koreans over a rising China, especially after
Beijing effectively sided with North Korea over the shelling of the South
Korean island and the sinking of a South Korean warship last year.
''I am not sure if China's performance over the past year or so has
drastically improved the marketability of the 'peaceful rise' or the image of
benevolent hegemon,'' Mr. Chun said at an international forum this month.
