Xi heads to Pyongyang, Moscow on his mind

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s upcoming visit to North Korea will be delicate and difficult. The relationship no longer resembles that of “lips and teeth” from the Korean War era — Korean lips and Chinese teeth. It has evolved into far more complex and contradictory ties, not one-sided but full of thorns for the Chinese.

North Korea is, in fact, the single greatest beneficiary of the war in Ukraine. In exchange for supplying weapons and troops, it has obtained Russian technology that has enabled a strategic leap in its missile and nuclear capabilities. (Just ahead of Xi’s visit, North Korea announced that its nuclear program is “irreversible.”)

This leap, however, has created two serious issues for China, which had naively encouraged North Korean support for Russia to prevent its collapse and the dangerous fallout that would follow.

The first is that it has alarmed South Korea and Japan, pushing them into a rearmament race. The North Korean threat is real, and, as such, it provides a genuine justification for the two neighbors to rearm. It is against North Korea and against the more real but unspoken and unspeakable threat posed by China.

The second problem is that the political bond between North Korea and Russia has deepened, placing a significant burden on China’s political advancement in Russia. If North Korea becomes like eastern Belarus, it would pose a threat to Beijing, perhaps greater than the growth of Chinese interests in Siberia poses to Moscow.

Naturally, it is precisely for this reason that neither Russia nor North Korea is ready to give up this new relationship, despite both being dependent on China. And, indeed, South Korea and Japan’s rearmament becomes, in this light, a new lever for Moscow and Pyongyang over Beijing.

This pressure may outweigh China’s possible advantage of playing the indirect North Korean wild card against whatever Beijing doesn’t like, mostly Taiwan, the island, de facto independent but de jure part of one China, where the nationalists fled after the communists took over the mainland.

Xi is therefore likely to go to North Korea, probably not in pursuit of a complete solution to the dilemma in which he finds himself trapped, but rather to shake up the bilateral relationship. So, some form of rapprochement — a reopening of dialogue between North Korea and America — could give China a little breathing room.

After that, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could meet Trump to reach a deal on nuclear weapons. It is unclear what kind of agreement could be reached. Perhaps the visit is also meant to gauge what is feasible, but a North Korean deal could serve as a diplomatic bargaining chip to pressure the US into leaning on South Korea and Japan.

This is a puzzle with millions of pieces all in motion, so the chance of anything fitting together would be something of a miracle.

North Korea has not historically served China well. The intervention in North Korea in the 1950s cost Mao Zedong very dearly. He lost his son and heir, killed in an American bombing, and had to forfeit any plan to conquer Taiwan.

North Korea dealt the newborn Chinese regime two systemic blows to its future: the end of an imperial line of succession and the failure to destroy its existential enemy, Nationalist China, which, from Taiwan, challenged the legitimacy of communist rule in Beijing.

This trip cannot be a non-event — at least not entirely. But whatever the outcome, it remains unclear whether it will be enough to get US President Donald Trump to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and whether that will be sufficient to assuage South Korean or Japanese fears.

That something is moving in this direction is nonetheless significant. It signals that China is unhappy with what is happening on the Korean Peninsula, that the situation has not been well managed — quite the contrary — and that the top leader must step in personally to set things right.

The Mao-Xi parallel

Xi came to power by skillfully moving every lever of China’s internal political machinery with undisputed ability. Mao had gained power and authority by managing war and foreign policy.

He had understood the connection between winning local consensus — among the peasants, the flesh and blood of China at that time — and the various internal and external actors stirring China.

He succeeded in purging the communist intellectuals, while also convincing non-communist intellectuals of his sincerity. Over the course of more than 20 years, he played Japanese against nationalists, Russians against Americans, each one against each other, and all for himself, to emerge in 1949 as the leader of China.

His game of cross-betrayals was blocked by the Russians, precisely in Korea. Russia’s Joseph Stalin compelled him to defend Kim Il Sung — then nearly overwhelmed by the American advance — thereby severing every thread connecting him to the US and dashing his hopes of conquering Taiwan. After the Chinese intervention in Korea, the Americans deployed their fleet to defend the island.

The official reason for the Korean intervention was that China had better have a buffer between itself and a US ally. In hindsight, it’s unclear whether the buffer was for China or the USSR, and whether the neighborly ties with a US ally would not have advanced China’s cause better than Soviet chains.

Mao’s authority — though he proved incapable of governing China and developing it economically — was never called into question, precisely because of his genius in international politics.

Xi, in some ways, finds himself working in reverse. He has shown he knows how to seize, maintain and expand his power domestically, but his judgment in foreign policy has shown flaws. This may have been the fault of the military, which in China bears primary responsibility for shaping the country’s foreign strategy.

Now, with the army purged and brought to its knees, it falls to Xi to see whether he can untangle the Gordian knot he holds in his hands.

Kim Il Sung sank Mao’s hopes; will his grandson salvage Xi’s? Over 20 years ago, the Chinese Journal “Strategy and Management” was allegedly closed after it published an article suggesting the possibility of a Chinese invasion of North Korea. At the time, the six-party talks on North Korea were facing resistance in Pyongyang.

The idea, never made public, has circulated in Beijing for decades. An invasion of Taiwan is near impossible; a land invasion of North Korea, especially if backed from the south, would be a much easier proposition. The North Korean nuclear program could be directed against China as well as against Western enemies.

Rumors about Kim’s possible death in 2020, at the onset of the Covid crisis, might have been linked to a sudden tension between China and North Korea.

It would be impossible to untangle all of China’s problems with North Korea, especially given that over the past 25 years, the situation has grown far more complicated. But Xi could certainly ease a few of them.

With decades of hindsight, one could say that Stalin set an impossible trap for China with North Korea, and that trap has been leveraged again by Russian President Vladimir Putin. To get out of it, Xi may need a very different mindset.

Some 80 years ago, Mao was held prisoner in Moscow, unsure whether he’d ever go back. Stalin, who had given Mao victory by backing him in Manchuria when he was on the verge of annihilation, was ready to replace him with a more pliable leader. Now, Xi is at least in a stronger position vis-à-vis both Russia and North Korea.

This article was first published by Appia Institute and is republished with permission. Read the original here.