Is China the Mastermind of the Russia-North Korea Partnership? | Opinion

For months, Russia has been launching North Korean missiles into Ukraine, including into Kyiv in the past few days; last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced an overnight attack had killed a father and his four-year-old son in a suburb of the capital. The Russian forces had fired four KN-23 missiles they had acquired from North Korea.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, has denied that it violated U.N. Security Council resolutions by supplying missiles to Russia, but satellite imagery shows that Pyongyang has recently sent more than 11,000 containers to Russia, after Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin met near Vladivostok last September. News outlets have reported that the two regimes had secretly agreed that the North would supply missiles and artillery shells and Russia would transfer nuclear weapon and missile technologies.
Since then, Putin traveled to Pyongyang in June and signed the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, which contains a mutual defense clause. Prior to the June treaty, China and North Korea were each other’s only military ally.
The dominant narrative is that Beijing is concerned about the growing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. As David Pierson and Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times put it in June, “Russia and North Korea’s defense pact is a new headache for China. “Importantly for Pyongyang, the partnership with Putin—while not without limits—generates valuable leverage against Beijing,” said Danny Russel of the Asia Society Policy Institute to the paper. “Playing major powers off against each other is a classic play in Korean history, and North Korea’s massive dependence on China in recent decades has been a liability that Kim Jong Un is eager to reduce.”
Talk about “massive dependence.” Recent estimates show that, before the North Korea-Russia deal on arms and technology, China accounted for about 95 percent of the North’s foreign trade. Much of the “trade” has been Chinese aid.
The North’s critical dependence on China suggests the Chinese are not that worried about Pyongyang’s move to bulk up their Russian ties.
First, the Chinese know that they have influence over the North Koreans and can get them to do what they want. They don’t always insist on obedience; they demand compliance only when they think they have a vital interest at stake.
The North Koreans, for their part, know the score. As former Russian diplomat Georgy Toloraya puts it, Russia is “an ambulance” providing emergency treatment to the North Koreans, while China is “the doctor who treats her day by day.” Kim Jong Un may hate the Chinese—as Koreans have for the better part of a millennium—but he also knows that he cannot move too far out of the Chinese orbit.
The Chinese are in fact confident when it comes to Korea. “Kim Jong Un’s Workers’ Party of Korea is still considered by China to be a junior subsidiary of the senior Communist Party regime in Beijing,” Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank in Prague told me this month. “North Korea fully depends on China’s economic aid to survive, as is increasingly the case with Russia,” Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, says. “So Beijing has leverage to ensure that any independent Russia-North Korea alliance will not go very far.” In short, Beijing believes that neither Vladimir Putin nor Kim Jong Un is strong enough to betray China.
There is, despite everything, an inclination in American policy circles to think the best of Chinese leaders, so it’s hard for Washington policymakers to believe that China actually approves of the growing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. There are, however, reasons to speculate that it does.
“While North Korea can be unpredictable, this move by Putin and Kim also benefits Beijing,” Sari Arho Havren of the Royal United Services Institute told Newsweek. “Xi does not want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, and Xi can also maintain the appearance of limiting direct military support for Russia himself.”
Beijing and Pyongyang are adept at fooling outsiders. China watcher Bill Triplett once told me that “Pyongyang and Beijing have operated one of the most successful denial and deception operations ever mounted.”
Washington is chock full of analysts who have downplayed the China-Russia relationship, arguing that because the two states have historically been adversaries, they cannot form a partnership now to take on the international order. Daniel DePetris and Jennifer Kavanagh in an article titled “The ‘Axis of Evil’ Is Overhyped,” state that America’s “biggest adversaries are far from a united threat.”
Even if their point is correct, it is nonetheless true, as James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy pointed out to me last month, that “China, Russia, and North Korea are more aligned today than at any time since the Korean War.”
Xi Jinping, I suspect, is not particularly upset that people think he is upset with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Xi, adopting tactics from his hero Mao Zedong, is trying to create “chaos” around the world. The Chinese leader, of course, does not want to be blamed, and fortunately for him, he has two friends who are chaos masters, Putin and Kim. He apparently believes it is in China’s interests to support them, and he obviously likes the idea that he’s not taking the heat.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and China Is Going to War. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.