China changing its tune

By JOHN POMFRET

WASHINGTON — There are surprising noises coming from China these days about North Korea. One influential Chinese academic thinks China’s policy — long supportive of the hermit kingdom — might be changing.

The government has been pretty careful about what it has said and what is done. But the tone from China’s scholars has changed significantly from a few years back when they would eschew on-the-record quotes for anything that was even mildly controversial.

Case in point is a recent piece by Zhu Feng, deputy director of the Center for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University and a political heavyweight.

Zhu argues that 1) North Korea’s claim that it carried out two nuclear tests because the U.N. Security Council criticized it for its satellite/missile test is bogus. He cites “Chinese experts” who tell him that North Korea would have needed six months to prepare a test, which means that North Korea planned to undertake these tests all along.

This leads Zhu to a significant conclusion about China’s role in all this. China, he said, had always believed that North Korea’s nuclear program was negotiable: That Pyongyang might be willing to give up its nukes as long as its economic and security interests could be met. Now, Zhu writes, all the evidence “points in the opposite direction. In fact, the recent nuclear test ... is not just a slap in the face of China, but a sobering wake-up call for the Chinese leadership to face up to the malignant nature of their North Korean counterparts.”

China, Zhu said, has tried to juggle its twin concerns about North Korea: de-nuclearization and preventing instability of the Kim Jong Il regime. But, he writes, once North Korea clarified that it had no intention to give up its nuclear weapons and instead upped the nuclear ante by escalating military tension on the Korean Peninsula, “Beijing’s longstanding and delicately balanced policy toward Pyongyang became a casualty of the second nuclear test from its neighbor of the North.”

So what is China going to do? Zhu thinks China’s policy could change.

And with a veritable toddler — Kim Jong Un, the 25-year-old son of Kim Jong Il’s third wife Ko Yong Hee — being readied for Lil Kim’s throne, Beijing might have an opportunity. Stay tuned.

X Pomfret, Washington Post Outlook editor and former Beijing bureau chief, writes the “Pomfret’s China” blog on washingtonpost.com, from which this article is adapted.