[lit-ideas] China's 'two-faced' nuclear stance
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 07:11:18 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HE10Ad01.html
China's 'two-faced' nuclear stance
By Todd Crowell
HUA HIN, Thailand - Are the Chinese playing a double
game on the issue of North Korean nuclear disarmament?
Syndicated columnist Tom Plate evidently thinks so. In
his latest column he suggests darkly a "secret
pro-nuclear understanding between Beijing and
Pyongyang".
In other words, Beijing tells the world and Washington
that it favors a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear
weapons, while quietly telling the North Koreans to
resist any overtures from the other
participants in the six-party talks to dismantle its
nuclear program.
The column is filled with heavy, loaded words, such as
"big lie", "two-faced", "Machiavellian", "bad faith",
"secret double-dealer" and so on, but it is light on
specifics. He cites a "nasty rumor" about China
playing a double game in the aftermath of Chinese
President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Washington and a
sense that Hu's response on the matter of a
nuclear-free Korea was "far less emphatic than
Bush's". He didn't elaborate on the rumor.
I have always had a lot of respect for Plate's work,
and he is certainly no knee-jerk China-basher, so you
have to wonder just what set him off. Surely it
couldn't have been pronouncements of the summit. How
can anyone take seriously anything that came out of
that misbegotten meeting?
If people think China is playing a double game, it may
be because they have set themselves up for
disillusionment by becoming victims of their own
rhetoric about how important China is to reaching a
resolution of the Korean nuclear issue.
It has often been said that China could bring
Pyongyang around to an agreement any time it chose to
do so by simply withdrawing aid and trade. This is
undoubtedly true, but Beijing has said more than once,
openly and up front, that it will not do this. Nothing
two-faced about it.
The Chinese are not particularly worried whether North
Korea has an atomic bomb. They don't believe Pyongyang
would be stupid enough to drop one on them.
Historically, China has not been concerned about
nuclear non-proliferation. Indeed, it is a recovering
proliferator herself.
The North Korean nuclear program concerns China
because it concerns the United States. The Chinese
worry that it might trigger a US attack on North
Korea, something they obviously don't want, even as
the threat of its actually happening recedes.
China's main interest in hosting the six-party talks
is to be a good world citizen, reap the prestige that
comes in helping broker any diplomatic breakthroughs
and garner any rewards that might come its way. Beyond
that it is indifferent to whether North Korea has a
bomb.
The South Koreans, too, are not overly worried about a
North Korean bomb. Deep down they don't believe that
their Korean brothers would ever drop one on them.
Seoul is currently obsessed with reconciliation with
Pyongyang and will not countenance anything that
impedes that goal.
This posture might change if the conservative
opposition wins the South Korean presidency in late
2007, but it is doubtful a new president would do much
to alter the situation except possibly to put more
emphasis on human rights. The "Sunshine Policy"
initiated by former president Kim Dae-jung is too
popular to be abandoned no matter who is president.
One might think that of the six parties to the
negotiations, Japan would take the strongest stand,
having the most to fear. After all, the North Koreans
have fired ballistic missiles in their direction in
the past.
But I was in Japan a year ago in February when North
Korea formally declared itself to be a nuclear-weapons
state, and the reaction in Japan was underwhelming, to
say the least. The headline in the Japan Times read:
"Announcement might complicate abduction issue", which
pretty much shows where Tokyo's priorities lie - an
accounting for its nationals abducted by Pyongyang.
Of course, the reaction might have been entirely
different if the North Koreans had proved their
assertion beyond a doubt by actually exploding an
atomic bomb. There is a school of thought that
believes - or wishes to believe - that North Korea
does not have a bomb because it has not mastered all
the elements of producing a workable weapon. Plutonium
bombs are tricky.
Supposedly the US is the one participant most
committed to ending North Korea's nuclear-weapons
program. But the ink was no sooner dry on the
"breakthrough" September 19 agreement at the last
session of the six-party talks than Washington raised
the extraneous issue of Pyongyang's counterfeiting US
currency.
This may be a legitimate beef on the part of
Washington, but how can a few million fake US$100
notes weigh against the prospect of a mushroom cloud
somewhere in the United States?
One has to wonder what kind of game Washington is
playing. If this is some kind of gambit in the
complicated game to bring Pyongyang to the negotiating
table, it is too Machiavellian - to use Plate's words
- for me to understand.
In this long, weary story, the US has dragged out
delivery of the aid and recognition it promised when
North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear-weapons
program in 1994. For its part, Pyongyang violated the
spirit by experimenting with uranium enrichment. You
don't have to look to China alone to find plenty of
bad faith.
Todd Crowell is an Asia Times Online correspondent
based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication
and republishing .)
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