At the beginning of 2011, Beijing repeatedly denied rumors that it was planning to send troops to North Korea. “Totally groundless,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, referring to reports in South Korean media that China had been holding discussions with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea about stationing of Chinese forces in the northeastern port of Rason. “China will not send a single soldier to other countries without the approval of the UN,” the Defense Ministry said to the Global Times, a Communist Party–run paper.
The denial was necessitated by South Korea’s broadsheets, which had been carrying stories for months that Beijing was negotiating the entry of the People’s Liberation Army into the DPRK, as the Kim family regime calls itself. In the most dramatic of the articles, the Chosun Ilbo reported in mid-January that sources said Chinese forces were already in North Korea. In the east, the reports stated, some fifty armored vehicles and tanks crossed the Tumen River at night about thirty miles from Rason in the middle of December. In the west, PLA jeeps in Dandong were seen heading to the North Korean city of Sinuiju, just south of the Yalu River, at about the same moment. If true, China’s troops are back in the North for the first time since 1994, when they withdrew from Panmunjom, the truce village in the Demilitarized Zone.
And why would Chinese forces be in the North? Some think China’s soldiers are stationed in the DPRK to seize defectors and “suppress public disturbances.” An unnamed South Korean official, quoted in Chosun Ilbo, said that “they’re apparently there to protect either facilities or Chinese residents rather than for political or military reasons.”
So far, no one has confirmed the presence of PLA elements in the DPRK. But even as Chinese security analysts were professing surprise at the Chosun Ilbo article, it is common knowledge in Beijing that China’s officials have had discussions with their North Korean counterparts about this matter for some time. For the Chinese, securing the mouth of the Tumen River has been a long-held strategic goal. By a quirk of history, it is Russia—not China—that has sovereignty over the northern shore of that vital waterway at its mouth, blocking direct Chinese access to the Sea of Japan.
To exert influence at the mouth of the Tumen, Beijing has exploited the most recent downturn in the North Korean economy, which is now more critically reliant on Chinese cash than ever. The North Koreans are struggling to avoid becoming, in the words of Korea watcher Bruce Bechtol, “a complete Chinese satellite,” but it is a losing battle. As one source told the Chosun Ilbo, “The North has apparently concluded that it is unavoidable to accept the Chinese military presence on its land to woo Chinese investment, even if it’s not happy about it.”
The willingness even to talk about allowing foreign troops on sacred Korean soil is an indication of just how bad things now are in Kim Jong Il’s country. After all, Kim bases the legitimacy of his rule on Juche, an ideology his father, Kim Il Sung, introduced two years after the end of the Korean War. Juche literally means “master of one’s self” or self-reliance. Nations without Juche were said to be colonies; so Kim Sr. branded South Korea, for instance, as a puppet of the United States.
By developing his own ideology, Kim Il Sung, in both appearance and reality, staked an independent path, avoiding the close embrace of either of his major big-power sponsors, Beijing and Moscow. He made North Korea dependent on aid immediately after the end of the Korean War, but never on any single donor. When either Communist giant temporarily spurned Kim—as both often did, in reaction to his notorious resistance to control—he simply turned to the other for handouts. Neither the Soviets nor the Chinese ever developed a satisfactory strategy for reining in Kim, who soon became known as Asia’s Talleyrand.
Yet his aid-dependent economy, which at first outpaced archrival South Korea, inevitably fell behind. Moscow, eager to enhance ties with an economically vibrant South, shifted sides in the zero-sum contest between Seoul and Pyongyang, ending aid in early 1991. China, although it reduced assistance in the early 1990s, never abandoned the DPRK. For more than six decades, the Chinese have stood with their North Korean compatriots in Communism.
That Beijing should continue to back this remnant of the Cold War highlights the notion that the tie-up between the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is perhaps the world’s oddest bilateral relationship. Mao Zedong said the two countries were “as close as lips and teeth,” and that description was mostly accurate for a while. Kim Il Sung sent Korean fighters to aid the Chinese revolution, and Mao returned the favor with his own “volunteers” during the “War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.”
Kim and Mao may not have been the best of allies after the Korean War, but they had much in common, especially on a personal level. The charismatic Communist comrades were Chinese-speaking, Confucian, and chubby. No wonder diplomacy between the two countries was conducted in person by their respective leaders.
Relations, of course, have not been the same since younger generations have taken over. There are strained ties at the top and communications problems at lower levels. Neither country retains strong institutional links with the other outside the military realm even though they are each other’s only formal ally. Kim Jong Il started purging officials who had good relationships with China in the 1980s in a bid to shore up his position as his father’s successor, and since the middle of the 1990s Beijing’s dealings with Pyongyang have been handled by people who know much less about the North than their predecessors.
Ties between the two capitals may not be as close as they once were, but the two nations remain locked in a permanent embrace. The boundary line that separates them is arbitrary, drawn after conquest, and has Koreans living on both sides. It has proved impossible to patrol without extraordinary effort. In winter one can walk into China across the frozen river—and in the summer, wade. At Yibukua (which means “one step across”), the Yalu River, which forms part of the border, is so narrow that people cross without wetting their feet.
This border, although artificial in some ways, nonetheless divides two very different peoples and mentalities. The Chinese, for hundreds of years, have viewed the Koreans as inferiors, vassals to their grander kingdom and followers of their more magnificent culture. Beijing leaders, whether they articulate this or not, see the Korean peninsula as a part of their natural sphere of influence. The DPRK, if it has any purpose for Beijing, is a buffer against South Korea and its ally, the United States.
On the south side of that same boundary line, the North Koreans bitterly resent their condescending Chinese overlords. They—and especially their leaders—are contemptuous of the Chinese, upset at perceived slights, and deeply suspicious of Beijing’s designs. The Koreans, although envious of China’s newfound prosperity, do not necessarily admire its people.
As a result, Pyongyang regularly bites the hand that feeds it. The Chinese provide the DPRK with ninety percent of its oil, eighty percent of its consumer goods, and forty-five percent of its food, much of it on concessionary terms. Aid from China, in fact, may be the only reason Kim Jong Il remains in power today. And yet Kim believes, at least most of the time, he does not have to show gratitude to his Beijing benefactors.
“We have some influence, but we don’t have the kind of relationship where we can tell Kim what to do,” says one Chinese expert on Korea. “If we tell him to do something, he doesn’t listen. If we threaten him, he listens even less.”