For the first time in history, the strategic objectives of the four major powers surrounding the Korean Peninsula, namely the United States, China, Russia and Japan, have converged on one concept ― domestic reform and external opening of the North Korean polity and economy.

The reform agenda includes denuclearization of the North, reducing military tensions on the peninsula and improving the human rights conditions in the North, and her opening up would entail economic growth and rising international trade as well as investment into the North.

The four powers have thus far succeeded neither in persuading Pyongyang to take up this road to common prosperity nor in intimidating it into doing so. However, Pyongyang responded with successive nuclear tests and long-range ballistic missile launches. The four powers and the global community show some sort of languishment facing this unstitchable gap between common sense and persecution mania.

The most immediate cause of this stalemate is the Beijing government’s desire to maintain the status quo. Various U.N. resolutions aimed to intensify blockade of North Korean trade have constantly proved ineffective as China continued its supply of essential military and non-military exports to North Korea.

From China’s point of view, the advantages deriving from the status quo by far surpasses the gains it can obtain by unsettling it. The mere existence of North Korea, whether weak or strong, provides a good balancing weight against a strong and prosperous South Korea. In fact as long as North Korea remains a threat to the peace and prosperity of South Korea and Japan, she remains a useful card to play against American interests on the peace and prosperity of Taiwan, as some nervous Taiwanese and even some mischievous Chinese academics believe.

Tragically to the North Korean leadership, by indomitably pursuing nuclear weapons and its delivery vehicles, North Korea itself is forcefully destroying this precarious status quo and continuously undermines the peaceful images of China.

China, which is the world’s largest consumer of food, resources, minerals and energy, needs not only to import these materials in massive quantities every year, but also acquire controls of farm lands, mines, oil companies all over the world. China has this impossible task to exhibit two different images; one that it is a peaceful power looking for prosperous coexistence with the rest of the world, and another that it is the world’s second strongest military power on the way to catch up with U.S. supremacy. China is very successful in the second task but in achieving the first task, the track record is punctuated with more failures than successes. Effectively supporting North Korea’s attempt to arm itself with nuclear weapons by playing with ambiguous words virtually eradicates the first image that China so carefully nurtured, for it is an indirect destruction of global peace and prosperity.

In the Feb. 28 issue of the Financial Times, Deng Yuwen, one of the leading Chinese Communist Party theoreticians, proposed an action that could unsettle this stalemate fundamentally. His proposition is that China should give up on North Korea for five reasons; the ideological chasm between China and North Korea is ever-increasing and has now surpassed the differences between the U.S. and China; the geopolitical buffering role of North Korea is invalid now due to the changes in military technology; the North Korean regime is incapable of taking up glasnost and perestroika; North Korea is only taking advantage of the China’s empathy that is based on blood-relations; and North Korean nuclear weapons can prove to be a threat to China eventually.

China’s profit-loss equation of supporting the rogue state in the northern border has now fundamentally changed. There is no status quo to China as far as North Korea is concerned, for she persistently destroys any status quo. For the purpose of internal controls, the North Korean regime has to prove to her people and military that her rockets can carry nuclear-headed missiles to the U.S. mainland, and China will have to support this hostility, should she continue to support the Pyongyang regime. To China it will become a choice between peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world, or declaring indirect hostility to the U.S.

Deng’s article is an indirect warning to Pyongyang that China is tired of its unending mischief. Although it is unlikely that China will drop North Korea any time soon, it is time that the four surrounding powers jointly demonstrate that introducing a reform agenda for the North does not automatically lead to a regime collapse. 

By Ungsuh K. Park

Ungsuh K. Park is a former president of Samsung Economic Research Institute. ― Ed.