For months, Russia has been launching North Korean missiles toward Ukraine, including toward kyiv in recent days. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that a nighttime attack had killed a father and his four-year-old son in a suburb of the capital. Russian forces had fired four KN-23 missiles that they had acquired from North Korea.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as the North calls itself, has denied violating UN Security Council resolutions by supplying missiles to Russia, but satellite imagery shows that Pyongyang recently sent more than 11,000 containers to Russia after Kim Jong-un met with Vladimir Putin near Vladivostok last September. Media reported that the two regimes had secretly agreed that the North would supply missiles and artillery shells and that Russia would transfer nuclear weapons and missile technology.
Since then, Putin visited Pyongyang in June and signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, which contains a mutual defense clause. Before the June treaty, China and North Korea were each other’s only military ally.
SERGEI GUNEYEV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The dominant narrative is that Beijing is concerned about growing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. As David Pierson and Choe Sang-Hun of The New York Times In June, “the Russia-North Korea defense pact is a new headache for China.” “What’s important for Pyongyang is that the partnership with Putin — while not without its limitations — generates valuable leverage against Beijing,” Danny Russell of the Asia Society Policy Institute told the newspaper. “Playing great powers off against each other is a classic game in Korean history, and North Korea’s massive reliance on China over the past few decades has been a liability that Kim Jong-un is eager to reduce.”
There is talk of “massive dependency.” According to recent estimates, before the North Korea-Russia arms and technology deal, China accounted for about 95 percent of the North’s foreign trade. Much of this “trade” was Chinese aid.
The North’s critical dependence on China suggests the Chinese are not so worried about Pyongyang’s decision to strengthen ties with Russia.
First, the Chinese know that they have influence over the North Koreans and that they can get them to do what they want. They do not always demand obedience; they demand obedience only when they believe they have a vital interest at stake.
The North Koreans, for their part, know better. As former Russian diplomat Georgy Toloraya put it, Russia is “an ambulance” providing emergency care to the North Koreans, while China is “the doctor treating them day by day.” Kim Jong-un may hate the Chinese—as the Koreans have for nearly a millennium—but he also knows that he cannot stray too far from China’s orbit.
The Chinese are actually confident about Korea. “Kim Jong-un’s Workers’ Party of Korea is still seen by China as a junior affiliate of the communist regime in Beijing,” Charles Burton of the Prague think tank Sinopsis told me this month. “North Korea is entirely dependent on Chinese economic aid to survive, as is increasingly the case with Russia,” said Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing. “So Beijing has the means to ensure that any independent alliance between Russia and North Korea will not go very far.” In short, Beijing believes that neither Vladimir Putin nor Kim Jong-un are strong enough to betray China.
Still, American policy circles tend to think highly of China’s leaders. So it’s hard for Washington policymakers to believe that China actually approves of Moscow’s growing ties with Pyongyang. There are reasons to think that’s the case, though.
“While North Korea can be unpredictable, this move by Putin and Kim also benefits Beijing,” said Sari Arho Havren of the Royal United Services Institute. Newsweek. “Xi does not want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, and Xi can also maintain the appearance of limiting direct military support to Russia himself.
Beijing and Pyongyang are masters at deceiving foreigners. China watcher Bill Triplett once told me that “Pyongyang and Beijing have conducted one of the most successful operations of denial and deception ever.”
Washington is full of analysts who downplay the Sino-Russian relationship, arguing that because the two states are historical adversaries, they cannot form a partnership to challenge the international order. In a paper titled “The Axis of Evil Is Overrated,” Daniel DePetris and Jennifer Kavanagh argue that “America’s greatest adversaries are far from a united threat.”
Even if their view is correct, it remains true, as James Fanell of the Geneva Centre 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.”
I think Xi Jinping is not particularly upset that people think he is angry with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Xi Jinping, adopting the tactics of his hero Mao Zedong, is trying to create “chaos” in the world. The Chinese leader obviously does not want to be held responsible and, fortunately for him, he has two friends who are masters of chaos, Putin and Kim. He apparently thinks it is in China’s interest to support them and he clearly likes the idea of not being targeted.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and China Is Going to War. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
