POLITICS-CHINA: Beijing Tries to Show Clout over North Korea

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Apr 22 2004 (IPS) - Just days after Washington cast doubt over Beijing’s influence on the Stalinist regime of North Korea, China’s leaders have showcased their unremitting efforts to steer the belligerent North into adopting more pragmatic economic polices and giving up its nuclear ambitions.

In three days of secretive meetings in Beijing, the entire Standing Committee of the powerful Politburo of China’s Communist Party met with North Korea’s reclusive leader Kim Jong Il.

Kim’s Apr. 19-22 visit is his first to China since the team of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao took over in 2003 from the older generation of Chinese leaders, led by Jiang Zemin.

The series of meetings was aimed at proving China’s enduring sway over its troubling and poor communist neighbour after U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney warned Chinese leaders earlier in April that time for nuclear negotiations with the North – which in October last year admitted to having a secret uranium enrichment programme – was running out.

Cheney presented Beijing with new evidence that North Korea possessed a nuclear bomb and said Asia was on the brink of nuclear arms race.

China has played host to two rounds of six-party talks with the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia aimed at ending the crisis. A third round is planned before July but results from the talks so far have been inconclusive.

Shortly after Kim’s armoured train left Beijing Wednesday, state media announced that his meetings with Chinese leaders have produced a consensus on how to end the nuclear stalemate.

”Leaders of the two parties and two countries have engaged in in-depth discussion about the bilateral, international and regional state of affairs as well as the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula,” said Liu Hongcai, deputy director of the Communist Party’s international department. ”They have reached broad-based consensus and gained positive results.”

During a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Kim said the North ”sticks to the final nuclear-weapon-free goal and its basic position on seeking a peaceful solution through dialogue has not changed,” state-run Xinhua news agency said. It said the two leaders ”agreed to continue .. jointly pushing forward the six-party talks process.”

Breaking a mandatory news blackout during Kim’s unannounced visits to Beijing, on Wednesday night Chinese Central Television broadcast a 12 minute-footage of Kim smiling and waving at and hugging Chinese leaders. In an obvious attempt to emphasise the importance central government leaders attached to the visit, Xinhua news agency ran lengthy reports on Kim’s meetings and eulogised the history of friendship and communist camaraderie shared by the two neighbouring countries.

Chinese leaders praised the North’s ”self-reliance and arduous work” in recent years and pledged to stand by to help Pyongyang with its economic development.

During his visit, Kim was shown Zhongguancun Technology Park in north-western Beijing, known as China’s Silicon Valley. On his way home Kim was expected to tour the major industrial centres of Shenyang or Dalian in China’s north-east to study government efforts to reinvigorate heavy industries with foreign investment.

Study trips have become routine during Kim’s rare visits to China. For some 25 years since China’s reform and opening up, Beijing has tried to guide Pyongyang into adopting market reforms and boosting the North’s bankrupt economy.

While the North Korean leader dutifully goes through the motion of hailing China’s showcase foreign-invested car factories, stock markets, research laboratories and information-technology achievements, little in the North has changed to resemble China.

North Korea lavishly celebrated what would have been the 92th birth anniversary of its late leader, Kim Il Sung. Almost 10 years after his death, he remains the country’s ”Eternal President”. After mass exhibitions of dancing and singing, speakers hailed him as the ”paragon of the world revolutionaries and a veteran statesman”.

The regime has allowed more than two million Koreans to starve to death before taking small and unconvincing steps in the direction of Chinese-style rural reforms.

Kim Jong Il continues to stick rigidly to his ”army first” policy, which means pouring all resources into the military in preparation for an invasion of the capitalist South Korea and mounting defiance of Washington.

To prevent the North’s collapse, Beijing is thought to be have been providing up to a billion dollars worth of food, oil and other basic necessities in recent years.

Without China’s efforts to repel a flood of refugees, officials here fear that the North might follow in the heels of East Germany. The whole embassy area of Beijing is ringed by barbed wire to prevent North Korean refugees from seeking asylum.

Earlier this month, Chinese border guards shot dead one North Korean refugee when he and 23 others tried to cross through China into Mongolia, according to the South Korean-based Christian mission Durihana. Many of those forcibly repatriated are executed or die in North Korean camps, activists say.

Beijing’s leverage over Pyongyang has remained open to question ever since the death of Kim’s father. The older generation of Chinese leaders had sentimental ties to late Kim Il Sung, who for nearly 20 years was a loyal member of the Chinese Communist party and spoke Chinese. This kinship however, never spread to Kim’s son and heir, Kim Jong Il.

Throughout the 1980s, Kim Jong Il denounced late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and instead fostered a military alliance with the dying Soviet Union, which was willing to support the North’s nuclear ambitions. Relations soured further when Beijing recognised South Korea in 1992 and were only revived when North Korea turned to Beijing, desperate for economic aid in 1989.

Kim believes the only thing that guarantees his survival is the North’s nuclear arsenal. But now China is pressing him to give that up as well, nervous that the United States might otherwise take unilateral action to disarm him.