Beijing urges US to talk with North Korea

Associated Press

BEIJING

Embedded within Chinese leaders’ convoluted, yet vague statements to Washington about North Korea is a simple message: Talk with Pyongyang.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s weekend discussions with officials in Beijing offered up the usual encouraging but familiarly noncommittal language on North Korea, emphasizing Beijing’s desire to strike a balance between easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula while not appearing to side against its prickly communist ally Pyongyang.

But while neither side offered details of their exchanges, Beijing is communicating its strong desire for some form of direct contact between the U.S. and North Korea as a means of defusing the ongoing crisis over North Korea’s nuclear threats that have prompted a massive show of force by the U.S. and South Korea.

“North Korea wants to talk, so why not talk?” said Shen Dingli, a security expert and director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University. The question for China, Shen said, is how to make such discussions come about, adding that China is unlikely to make such calls too explicit for fear of putting either side in a quandary.

Highlighting the difficulties of getting North Korea to talk with the U.S., the North rebuffed last week’s proposal by Seoul to resolve tensions through dialogue. North Korea dismissed the proposal as a “crafty trick” to disguise what Pyongyang calls the South’s hostility, and said it won’t talk unless Seoul abandons its confrontational posture.

Chinese media reports on Kerry’s Saturday talks largely downplayed North Korea, and the Foreign Ministry’s official statements were predictably blurry. In its account of his meeting with Kerry, the ministry quoted Premier Li Keqiang as referring only to “those who stir up trouble on the peninsula only harm their own interests, like moving a stone only to drop it on one’s own foot.”

That was a near echo of President Xi Jinping’s own comment in a speech earlier this month that “no one should be allowed to throw the region, or even the whole world, into chaos for selfish gains” — seen as much as a rebuke to the U.S. and its allies as to North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong Un. The ministry’s account of Kerry’s meeting with Xi didn’t mention the Korean Peninsula even obliquely.

As China has grown more critical of North Korea since the latter’s third nuclear test in February, Beijing remains highly wary of pushing the hard-line communist regime too far. China says it wants a Korean Peninsula free from nuclear weapons, but that all sides must play a role in that.