Is Russia replacing China as North Korea's closest ally?
55:47 Share

Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? Over the last few months, there have been increasingly reports about a Russo-North Korean alliance. Lately, we've heard that there may be some 10 or 11,000 North Korean soldiers sent to Russia for training, who may well see active combat in the coming days, if not already. And yet, both countries' most powerful neighbour and ally, China, has remained suspiciously quiet about this new development.

Beijing's silence may well express a deep distrust and unease that actually characterises China's relationship with its so-called allies. To get into these recent developments and what we can learn from the history of the relationship between these three countries, with me today is a historian John DeLure, an expert on the Cold War and the history of China and the Korean Peninsula. He is a visiting professor at Lewis University and author of Agents of Subversion.

John, welcome back to Chinese Whispers. Yeah, I'm delighted to talk with you again, Cindy. To start with, can you outline what we know about North Korea's involvement in and support for the Russian invasion? Because there's been reports now here and there, but do we have a clear picture of it? I'd say we have a fairly clear picture, although we should keep in mind that neither the North Korean nor the Russian government have confirmed this.

But what we know from Ukrainian and U.S. government confirmed and South Korean media confirmed reports is that upwards of around 11,000 North Korean troops are in Russia. And the latest reports indicate that they're really ready to see battle. They're in the Kursk region of Russia and apparently joining in the Russian counteroffensive against Ukrainian forces.

which have been there since the summer. And so it's really extraordinary. I mean, Cindy, if we just stop there, you got to go back to, I don't know what, maybe the Mongolian invasions of Eastern Europe, you know, of Genghis Khan, before you get to the point where an Asian, an East Asian state has soldiers in Europe or on the doorstep of Europe. So it's really quite extraordinary. And this isn't, you know,

a construction brigade. This is, we would call it the size of a division. These are apparently, you know, crack troops. There's some debate in terms of the quality of these forces and we'll be seeing how they do in battle, but they do, from the intelligence, you know, reports, they appear to be

combat units and by North Korean standards, well-trained ones ready for action. And there have already been reports of engagements of fighting between Ukrainians and North Koreans coming out of Ukraine. And then again, there's anticipation of soon maybe large scale engagements.

I mean, this seems like quite an extraordinary escalation, as you say, on that historical lens, but also for the invasion itself, because Russia hasn't really had any military support from other countries. And China has been steadfast in not giving any lethal aid, let alone, you know, boots on the ground.

And for North Korea to go ahead and do this, I guess in some ways it's not a surprise because the two leaders have been getting closer in the last year or so. Well, yes. I mean, first of all, you're right to point out the gap between North Korea and China. And actually, you could see that from the beginning of the war. I mean, on the one hand, obviously, Xi Jinping met with Vladimir Putin and you had the no limits partnership and all of that. He met with him, summited just prior to the invasion.

But once the invasion started, Xi Jinping really tried to keep that fence-sitting kind of neutrality. Whereas the North Koreans, if you go back and look at the first votes in the UN General Assembly, North Korea was one of, I think, four other countries that was voting with Russia down the line on everything where China would maybe abstain.

and their remarks out of the foreign ministry, again, from the get-go. You could see the difference between North Korean statements and Chinese statements. North Korea and Belarus were the only ones that were just full-throated support for what Russia was doing. So that's one way in which this is a culmination. This is a kind of logical culmination of developments that have been coming quite a while. I mean, as you say,

Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin. I would date it back to 2019, actually, well before the invasion, when Kim went to Vladivostok and had what looked like very friendly meetings with Putin. And then since then, there were two other summits, Kim returning to Russia for a longer trip, meeting Putin there, and then Putin visiting Pyongyang.

And John, of course, the Chinese position is quite a calculated one, as you say, this fence sitting, and it's here for a reason. So given that the North Koreans have taken a very different approach, let's say, what has been the Chinese reaction to all of these reports? Well, we've seen something that you'll observe in other areas of Chinese foreign policy where

I mean, this is an unprecedented event. China is on paper an ally as well of North Korea. You know, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin just signed this alliance this year, a comprehensive strategic partnership, which we can really describe as a military alliance. But since 1961, the PRC and DPRK have been

treaty allies and there's a clause in there of coming to one another's aid and defense. And yet here you see a North Korean division heading to Russia and soon ready to be fully engaged in combat in Europe and you have to search pretty hard to find comments from the Chinese foreign ministry about this. So Beijing is sort of staying mute and mum and leaves us

forced to speculate a bit. Certainly, there is no affirmation of what's going on. There is no defense of what's going on. And we can, I think, read between the lines of the general state of China-North Korea relations and the messaging back and forth between Pyongyang and Beijing, because that's always carefully calibrated between these two states and medias. You know, I mean, they've been doing this for a very long time. And generally speaking,

things are not very warm in that relationship right now. You know, it's kind of the dog that's not barking, but there's cool messages being traded back and forth between Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping in stark contrast with the love fest and bromance that's been happening between Kim and Putin. If you read the messages juxtaposed with one another, it's quite obvious that Kim and Xi are back in a place that they had been before, which is

very distant relationship. And I would say laced with more than coolness, but a real dislike and distrust. So now that said, Beijing has not come out and put out a statement saying, you know, we are highly concerned about this development. We oppose the escalation of this war. You know, statements you could imagine China making, those have not been forthcoming.

That's what makes me think, and then this is a speculation too, that maybe Beijing is trying to see how this plays out and basically keeping its powder dry to understand what's the best play for China for now, because it seems to be quite nascent development. So I don't believe the foreign ministry when they say, we don't know anything about these things, these developments, and both countries are denying it. So we don't have any extra information. I mean,

That I find very hard to believe that Beijing doesn't know what's going on or isn't trying to find out. On the other side, you've got, for example, the Biden administration, it's been reported that they've been trying to talk to the Chinese diplomats and get China to dissuade North Korea from taking this step and from taking further steps. And you do wonder whether or not China will listen to that. But so far, it does just seem like China is just

sitting still, we're just going to see how this plays out. Almost as if back to the first days of the Russian invasion where the foreign ministry was also very, very quiet on what they thought. Yeah, I think that's right. It does raise an interesting question about how much Beijing has been informed along the way

by either Kim or Putin. I mean, ostensibly, these are two of, again on paper, these are two of Xi's closest partners. They're right there geographically. Just like we had all that discussion of how much did Putin tell Xi on the eve of the invasion. My

informed speculation, still speculation, is Kim has told nothing to Xi as he made these decisions to commit a division. And we should say this may be the beginning. This is most likely not. I mean, it depends on how the war evolves as well. But this could be just the beginning of North Korea's involvement in the war. So how much has Kim told him, even along the lines of a heads up

Again, we can't know these things for sure, but there have not been the kind of high level visits that would suggest that that sort of very sensitive information is being passed, you know, between the capitals.

This goes back to the previous point about the dog that's not barking, which is high-level engagement has stepped way up between North Korea and Russia. It's not only at the highest level, but also if you look at someone like the foreign minister, Chae Sun-hee, who's a trusted advisor to Kim Jong-un. It's been quite a while since she's visited China, but she's made multiple trips to Russia. So there's no outside indication.

that Xi Jinping Beijing is being informed along the way of this major geopolitical development in their neighborhood. Maybe Putin told them. But that also goes to this underlying issue of the kind of trust or lack thereof between China and North Korea. But I think it also goes to your point about, or your inference about the foreign ministry just kind of staying on the back foot

and trying to defer and not make comment because they're really not in control of the situation. That I think also makes them very uncomfortable. Now, as far as the US strategy you mentioned of highlighting this and almost trying to force the issue and see if they can squeeze some kind of cooperation out of China on this, I think that's

perfectly sound as a strategy. Obviously, though, now with the election results, you know, how much weight does Secretary Blinken's message carry? I mean, I think now the whole world is in a new mode, foreign policy wise, of how is the Trump administration and Donald Trump going to approach this. So that would only compound the logic in Beijing of let's just try not to answer any question on this one and figure out how we can play it.

And we'll definitely talk about Trump because you just cannot avoid the topic at all. But before we get there, I want to really kind of get into this question about the distrust, John, because I think for some listeners, it might be a surprise because there is a view, I think, in the West of this kind of axis of evil. I say that in quote marks.

between non-democratic giant countries such as Russia and China. Iran is often thrown in there. North Korea, while not a large country, is often seen as the same kind of axis of evil. To make the point that actually there's a lot of distrust between these partnerships or alliances, or even using those words might be to overstate the issue, I think it's a fascinating point that actually not everyone would necessarily have expected.

So I want to take a closer look at China's relationship with North Korea. And I thought we could start with a quote from premier Zhou Enlai, Mao's premier, who said, to describe the Chinese relationship with North Korea, which basically means when the lips are gone, the teeth feel the cold. And even today, you know, the Chinese side use this phrase to basically describe North Korea's lips and China's, the teeth that need to be protected. So

Decipher that for us. What does that mean in terms of how China sees why North Korea is strategically important? I mean, I want to say partner. I don't know if you think that's overstating it. Well, I'm happy to do this, Nassini. You'll have to cut me off because I don't know how much your listeners can stand when you get a historian going on lips and teeth in these things, because it does have this question, you know, you ask has a really long tail.

in terms of the China-Korea relationship. I mean, Zhou Enlai there is quoting a phrase that goes back, as I've traced it, I think at least to the Song Dynasty, you know, to the 12th century. And if we start with that, it is this throughout the whole modern period and modern very broadly defined, the Korean Peninsula is a place of profound strategic importance

for China, especially when the capital moves to Beijing, because keep in mind the capital used to be in other parts and further south. But once the capital is in Beijing, the Korean Peninsula becomes sort of an attack corridor. Japan used it twice, once unsuccessfully in the late 1500s and then successfully in the late 1800s.

for that purpose. So that's one key point is that in this very cold, it doesn't matter who is in power, if they're a democracy or autocracy, if they're wealthy or impoverished, that piece of territory, which in the traditional Chinese concept is not part of China.

The autonomy of the Korean Peninsula is kind of pretty deeply recognized again in the modern period in the Chinese mindset. Still, even though it's not part of China, it is critically important that that protect at some level, whether it's through its neutrality, buffer state status, or being under the hegemony of whoever's in power in China. The Korean Peninsula is...

Prime real estate, absolutely critical. That's kind of a lesson of modern Chinese history. Now, flip perspective and look at that if you're first the king of Korea for hundreds of years trying to deal with that pressure of being strategically important. And then you have kind of 50 years of Japanese colonial control in Korea, which in a way doesn't count for the purpose of this conversation.

Then you get into post-World War II where you had a divided communist North Korea and US-allied South Korea. If you're sitting there on the Korean Peninsula, you can feel this incredible pressure of this behemoth, this gigantic state that you know needs you. That gives you value, but that also puts a huge amount of pressure on you. And so if we jump into the period of

North Korea, communist North Korea, and it's basically three generations now of Kims who have ruled it continuously since it was founded in 1945. Each one of those Kims, the grandfather, the father, and now the son, if you want to call them that, they have always had these profoundly complicated relationships with a communist China, you know, that is ostensibly their ideological brother.

and again, fought the Korean War together since 1961 treaty ally. Yet throughout that whole historical period, the Kims look for every device that they can to maintain autonomy. They're constantly pushing back against Chinese influence and power over Korea. And it's quite relevant actually, the whole question of what's going on with Russia.

Because for the Cold War, throughout the Cold War, going back to the Korean War itself and all the way through until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the classic strategy that North Korea relied upon was to kind of move back and forth between Moscow and Beijing, which of course were rivals, you know, from 1959 onward when you had the Sino-Soviet split. North Korea was an absolute master in

of playing the Soviets off the communist Chinese. And we are seeing a little bit of a rehash of that today, that pattern. You know, all this stuff about the Axis, and it's like a parlor game in Washington, D.C. I mean, there's so many different ways of trying to name the Axis. We have to be very careful about that. It's certainly from a historical experience that

China, Russia and North Korea do not have some blueprint that they can work off from either the Cold War period or the post-Cold War period, where the three of them were in sync, you know, and sort of working together in a block. Quite the opposite. It is constant intrigue and internal contradiction. And North Korea in particular is constantly working against Chinese influence.

within that grouping. So that I think is a really important lesson of history that as you say is not, doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider these are two of the last few Communist Party states in the world. In fact, there's a deep distrust between them.

I was struck when doing the research for this topic that actually there have been at least two attempts to change the Kim in power, where the North Koreans seem to think that the Chinese at least knew about it or maybe even gave the blessing for a certain regime change. So once in the 50s when it was Kim Il-sung and with the so-called Yan faction, is that right? And then a second time in the 2010s when it came to Kim Jong-un and his cousin Kim Jong-nam, the one who was later assassinated.

I mean, so I didn't realize that China had this kind of, I mean, what do you think the Chinese role was in these two kind of attempts to kind of usurp the leader?

Yeah, those are two wonderful examples that can kind of get us into the complexity of this relationship. So if we start with the 1950s, first of all, coming out of the Korean War, one of the things that Kim Jong-un, sorry, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather, did was to move against

this faction, the so-called Yan'an faction, aligned the North Korean communists who were kind of connected with, more deeply connected with the Chinese communist movement, which is of course based in Yan'an.

in that period of time. And so Kim started to move against to kind of undermine and then really go after the Yan'an faction. He also, by the way, went after the so-called Moscow faction. He was going after every faction that was not his faction, who are known as the partisan or guerrilla faction. But this reached a point in, first of all, in 1956, there was a serious challenge to Kim Il-sung's control. And...

Beijing and Moscow were both a little bit basically waiting to see how it was going to play out. They did not come down definitively. They sort of let the power dynamics within North Korea play out. They had gotten a heads up. We know this from the diplomatic cables and traffic. They kind of let it play out. And you can imagine if you're Kim Il-sung how you feel about that. Now he started to go very hard after North Korea.

again, the Yan'an and Moscow faction in the wake of that, not quite coup, but sort of leadership challenge that to him would have felt like an attempted coup. And in a really fascinating moment that comes from that last tail end before the Sino-Soviet split, before China and the Soviet Union are at loggerheads, Moscow and Beijing jointly sent an intervention

So Mao and Khrushchev sent very high level emissaries to fly to Pyongyang, go to Pyongyang and say, look, Kim, back off, cool it down. You know, we know you got to do what you got to do, but go easy on these factions. And I mean, it's sort of humiliating from his perspective. Talk about, you know, gansha, talk about interfering in others' affairs. This is directly meddling in high politics, sensitive politics of the Kim regime and of the DPRK.

So that's sort of one of those moments that's, you know, North Koreans aren't going to talk about that in their propaganda, but it's scar tissue that's just written in to their understanding of even these guys, how dangerous it is, how the North Koreans and the Kim regime have to defend itself against, again, influenced by North Korea.

Beijing and Moscow. And for survival as well, right? I think Kim Jong-un, I don't know, I can't remember if this was a conversation with Trump that he had when, or someone else, he said, you know, you don't understand this is for my own survival. I have to do things like this because it feels very, very personal that this is a Game of Thrones that is very fatal. Yeah, right. Well, so that's the grandfather. When we talk about, when we fast forward to the second example you gave, and then there's sort of

There's, I would say, two examples that can be kind of mashed up as far as the earlier years of Kim Jong-un and as he was consolidating power and basically eliminating his rivals. There were two really brutal and dramatic moments of consolidation of power, for lack of a better phrase, one of which was when he had his uncle

by marriage, if you remember Jang Song-taek, this is 2014. So Kim Jong-un ordered his uncle arrested publicly. We have pictures of it released by the North Koreans at a party meeting. He was dragged out and then executed. And if you look at the rap sheet on Uncle Jang,

I don't think the word China is in there, but it's pretty obviously China because it mentions his nefarious activities across the border. This was not Zhang Zongtec going to Russia. This was Zhang Zongtec in China. And Zhang was considered kind of a trusted interlocutor and had a lot of contacts in China, was known in China.

So that also fed this notion of Kim Jong-un feeling threatened by Chinese influence via the Uncle Hu. And what was his crime? What was Uncle Zhang's crime? Well, if you read, you know, who knows at the end of the day, I point out to my students, if you study dynastic politics, it's never good. The two people you don't want to be when there's a succession, you know, and you have a young prince, you don't want to be the uncle.

especially by marriage. And the other thing you don't want to be is an older half-brother. And, you know, guess what happens really like textbook dynastic politics. Kim Jong-un took out his uncle. And then the other incident, which I think you were also alluding to, is Kim Jong-nam, his older half-brother. Right, of course, his half-brother, not his cousin. Yeah, who had been based out of Macau for quite a while and was under, it was, it was,

understood that he was under a kind of soft protection by the PRC, obviously. If they really wanted him out of Macau, they would have pushed him out of Macau. But he, of course, was cruelly and frighteningly assassinated by these kind of, in that, you know, Le Carre movie episode in the KL airport in, that would have been, I guess, 2017. And so the fact that here's the second person

member of the family that Kim Jong-un eliminates brutally, again, with a connection to China. So I think that's where you have a sense that this thing is, you know, is in Kim's mind in terms of his personal and regime security. Mm-hmm.

Which really kind of puts into context this idea that China might use its leverage over North Korea. I mean, I guess Pyongyang might not take kindly to any kind of thing that might be seen as influence, you know, going back to this question of the American tactic. Yeah, that's right. I mean...

I've made obviously lots of trips and spent time in China and also on those trips talked about North Korea with China's Korea experts and others. And I have, it's dated now, but I made a number of trips to North Korea in kind of the late Kim Jong-il, early Kim Jong-un years. And one thing I picked up on both sides was the kind of casual disregard and dislike and again, distrust

that North Koreans and Chinese feel toward one another. I mean, it's really a strained relationship. It is not, and it's only gotten more so in the Xi-Kim years because you can see how Kim Jong-un kept a distance, did not visit Beijing for many years after taking power. And it's finally only after

in that wild, crazy, fire and fury years of 2017, but then 2018, and he starts to meet with Trump, and he starts to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and all this, then he finally starts to go to China. So you've got five meetings between Xi and Kim in the space of 12 months in that rare moment of time, and then back to nothing.

So, you can, again, you can read, that's another kind of metric we have to read the guardedness in the relationship, particularly in the Shikim era. But nevertheless, as you mentioned, there is a military relationship between the two countries, this treaty pact.

There's also, to go back to what we were talking about with the lips and the teeth, this idea that the Korean Peninsula is a bit of a buffer, or at least a vulnerability for Chinese border sovereignty. Does China see North Korea as a bit of a necessary evil to prop up the regime as it still goes, but it kind of does it while holding its nose? Is that how it sees it?

Yeah. I mean, evil may be too strong a word, but a necessary headache, sometimes a migraine, you know? Annoying as a brother. You can't just do that. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the buffer state

maybe gets bandied about too much, but it's true in the sense that if you just look at the map and again, think about the history we discussed of the strategic importance of this particular peninsula, which is not going to be part of China, it's going to be independent, but in what kind of status is of profound importance if you're in Beijing.

And for as difficult as North Korea is, and it is very difficult for Chinese policymakers and leaders, and historically always has been. Again, it's either a headache or a migraine, depending on the day. It's actually the nuclear age. Right. But still, it is not a U.S. ally. It is not South Korea, which has 30-odd thousand U.S. soldiers stationed on its territory.

And it can be when necessary, a giant listening post for US global intelligence, you know. As well as that intercontinental missile system that the Americans installed, THAAD. Oh, THAAD. Yeah, well, THAAD. No, exactly. It's if you think about all of the things that a,

unified Korea or a North Korea, just imagine North Korea is a US ally. And think about what that means in terms of the 1200 kilometer border and the strategic importance of the Chinese Northeast and the proximity to the capital. As bad as North Korea is, it's something that China can live with. And border stability obviously is important to

to China. And for all his profound shortcomings, Kim Jong Un from a cold-hearted border control perspective, the Kim Jong Un era has been stable in terms of there hasn't been a refugee crisis. There's probably been, it's documented there have been less North Koreans coming across that border than before. So just that basic stability in its periphery, which is

critically important to the Chinese leadership, North Korea provides it. And that refugee point is really interesting, too, because there's obviously the balance of power calculus that's going on about what's happening in the region. But then there's also a very immediate question about refugees flooding across the border into China, right, which China definitely doesn't want, and is very kind of clear eyed about the fact that if there is regime change or regime collapse, that could well happen. Yeah, that's right. And if you look back,

At the transition period, 2011 to 12, when the father Kim Jong-il died and Kim Jong-un took power, there was all kinds of speculation about that and reporters going up to the border area and discussion of that the Chinese were preparing camps to house the refugees if the DPRK, as we knew it, just kind of collapsed.

you don't see as many of those articles and speculation because Kim Jong-un is pretty much got the place under wraps, you know, and it looks pretty much politically stable despite not doing well economically. Who knows what kind, I think the big question in what's going on, one of the big questions in terms of what's going on with Russia is just in pure economic terms, what kind of payback is coming

Putin providing and how much can that help the North Korean economy because it's a very strange economy, you know and a relatively small amount could be a major windfall for North Korea, but point is Kim jong-un has consolidated power and run the country in a stable way in a way that basically

you know, checks the box as far as what China is looking for on its border. It's not a U.S. ally and it's basically stable and not going to, you know, cause some kind of crisis on our border. I think this is an interesting one in terms of if we get into the nuclear program. My suspicion is that one thing, in general, Beijing did not like the nuclear weapons program, but there wasn't much they could do to stop the North Koreans and they weren't going to risk it.

And so they basically stood by as it happened. I don't think that was in their interest. Again, I think that was a migraine for them. But one thing I think in particular the Chinese did not like were the nuclear tests.

Because that's where also it starts to provoke strong responses from the Chinese public, you know, public health and safety concerns in Dongbei in the northeast where people are like, when the wind blows after the North Koreans do a test, our kids are breathing this stuff, you know, and if that mountain that they use for the test collapses and becomes like a toxic site,

a Chernobyl of the East, then what does that mean for us? And we'll see. I think that Kim Jong-un, one thing he's become restrained about, he stopped the testing in...

in the last round of kind of negotiations with Trump. I don't think he'll, I think he's holding off on resuming testing because it would really upset Xi.

Now, you can have me back on when he does it. And that was totally wrong. Or we can talk about how furious China is. We'll see. Yeah. And I guess one worry that China might have about the Russia-North Korea partnership at this moment is the fact that Russia has need for more military help. And that's why they've gone to North Korea. But

But it also has a much, much, much more mature nuclear program. So could there be a quid pro quo there where the Russians say, it's not just economic aid we're going to give you in return for this help. It's also nuclear expertise. I suppose, I mean, there's a lot of analysis going on, you know, informed speculation and analysis on that question. I mean, the North Korean nuclear missile program is already extremely advanced.

I'm not sure we have fully absorbed that. You know, I mean, the standard estimates are they have a nuclear weapons arsenal of like 50,000

deliverable warheads. And we've seen them testing all kinds of short, mid-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles. I was just out in the region and I was flying from Taiwan to Korea. And an hour before I landed in Incheon, North Korea tests an ICBM. And an hour before I left, they shot off seven, I forget which kind of missiles those were, you know. So

There's always more that they can do than anyone can do. And Russia has very sophisticated capabilities, you know, coming off of the Soviet program. But I don't know if you're a Chinese strategist. It's like, OK, yeah, they could get this stuff from the Russians, which would make them even that much more capable. But they're already a nuclear weapons state, you know, with lots of ways to deliver them.

So I'm not sure that that's the top priority, at least from Beijing's perspective. I think maybe more concerning at that level would be, depending on how all this plays out, that North Korea's, let's say it's ongoing participation. Let's say this is the first 10,000 of 100,000 North Korean troops, you know, and they're fighting in lots of different ways in a Russo-Ukrainian war that just grinds on and on. Yeah.

You can imagine that stimulating and continuing to augment this idea of the Indo-Pacific being interlinked with the transatlantic alliances. This U.S. security vision of we have to kind of connect these parts in a grand strategy, which is maybe tactically justified by

confronting the Russo-North Korean threat to Europe, but strategically is ultimately about China, right? As we kind of know the Indo-Pacific strategies. And so that's where, again, as a strategist in Beijing, I'm like, this is not good for us because this just helps make the argument. And you would watch closely a place like South Korea,

which, you know, was pretty muted in its response, in its support for Ukraine, has not provided arms directly to Ukraine, has...

slowly distance itself from Russia, but it took quite a while, you know, was also slow to get on board with the Indo-Pacific idea. You know, there's a lot of complexity to South Korea's strategy, despite obviously being a loyal U.S. ally. Within that, it then is very worried about how does it get by in its region.

And so, but, you know, North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine obviously puts a huge amount of direct pressure on Seoul. And I feel that now being based in Europe to be like Europe's looking at South Korea and being like, hello, what are you guys going to do about this? You know, these are your brothers fighting our brothers in Europe. So that kind of pressure is not good from a Chinese strategic standpoint.

perspective. Yeah, certainly. I mean, the Chinese view has always, or at least the Chinese narrative has always been, this is a war happening on a different continent, nothing to do with us, gov. But now that argument becomes much harder to make. John, I want to talk about reform and opening as a period when it comes to this relationship, because that must have been a

quite an extraordinary thing to watch from Pyongyang's perspective that China suddenly became this kind of state capitalist economy and this economic Goliath. Obviously, it was always a giant on the doorstep, but now it's an economic superpower as well.

through doing it in a way that is ideologically so different to what China had been before and to what North Korea proclaims to be now. What was that period like to watch from Pyongyang's perspective? Yeah, well, I was very intrigued by that as well. I remember...

seeing one of these declassified transcripts, you know, documents. There's wonderful stuff that mostly the Woodrow Wilson Center for International History has put a lot on its website of East European and also Soviet documents from their embassy in Pyongyang, you know, and you could kind of get this backdoor view of the Cold War discussions. But there was one discussion in which Kim Il-sung was meeting with Erich Honecker

the East German leader, and they were talking about China. And, you know, Kim was just sort of, oh, I just can't believe the Chinese. You know, this is like circa 1988. And just kind of, isn't it horrible what they're doing over there? You know, I'm paraphrasing. And Kim says, we, as far as we're like you, we, North Korea and you, East Germany, we're sticking with socialism.

We're not going off on this crazy. So as late as 88, there was that idea, which I think he genuinely believes. Kim Il-sung thinks that the Chinese are off on some crazy revisionist path that they're going to end up regretting.

It's not really until when you get into the 90s, though, is when, I mean, that's the period that also in terms of North Korean history and its contemporary configuration is most important to understand because after the Cold War, North Korea is left totally alone. I mean, Russia, for example, completely abandons North Korea under Yeltsin. It's a very cold cutoff of the relationship between

total cut off of the relationship. China

softens the blow a little bit but remember in 1992 China normalizes relations with South Korea with the ROK with the public of Korea and gives nothing to North Korea so that is seen that's another one of those daggers you know that the North Koreans carry around in their back in terms of we will never trust the the Chinese and then the bottom just kind of falls out for North Korea economically um

Kim Il-sung dies in 1994, and then it just goes into a tailspin, much like China in the late 50s and early 60s of one of the worst famines in recorded history, and just really bottoming out. So coming out of that, I think it was then impossible for the North Koreans, and now you're in the Kim Jong-il era, it was impossible to gainsay the fact that obviously the Chinese have figured something out.

And we, North Korea, have failed too. And then I think you get into a different dynamic, which is resentment at Chinese success. Again, I picked up a little bit of this in the years when I was making trips to North Korea myself because Chinese tourism was kind of a thing at that point.

And of course, I could chat with the Chinese tourists in Chinese. Hey, what are you doing in Pyongyang? And what brings you here? It was a very patronizing attitude, really. I mean, you can understand, you know, Chinese tourists were going to North Korea because it's like, yeah, this is kind of reminds us of how messed up our country was. It's always kind of like poverty nostalgia. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And so it was a funny form of red tourism in a different era before the, it wasn't patriotic red tourism like the Xi era red tourism. This was dungest red tourism of like, thank God we're not like this anymore.

You know, and but of course, North Koreans can pick up on that, you know, and just the kind of general. So yeah, it's, it's, I think that's the general trajectory. I think for a very long time, North Korea thought they were still on the right path. And the Chinese were the errant ones. Now, if we look at them, in some ways, they're

and there are netizen jokes about this, about China becoming more like North Korea. In some ways, Xi brought the Chinese model closer to a North Korean level of great leader worship and attempting to impose way stronger controls, tighten the control dial all the way up. Kim Jong-un has not liberalized North Korea by any stretch, but I guess the point would be the Chinese model has moved a little bit toward the North Korean model.

Kim has remained fairly... He's suggested he wants to be the big leader of a kind of reform and opening, but he's never actually done it. So he's had Dungist aspirations, but he's ruled Dung.

like a Shiist. Well, this kind of brings me on nicely to my next question, which is, would it not be in China's interest for there to be some kind of Dengist reform in North Korea such that it is still not a Western ally, but it is at least a functioning economy where the people are well fed, where you see...

You're integrated in a global economic system such that you don't want to just go carry out nuclear strikes. Would that not be in the Chinese interest? And if so, why haven't they helped more in doing that?

I think it would. I've heard Chinese experts and strategists talk about that for, I guess, decades at this point. For that representing their kind of optimal scenario for a future North Korea was one that... And in some of these arguments, Chinese interlocutors would say, look, they're not going to give up the nuclear deal.

But once they have it, just like us, China, once we got our nuclear weapon, Mao was then able to pivot to normalize relations with the U.S. And then Deng was able to open us to the world. There has always been Chinese thinking that that is the optimal scenario for North Korea. And I mean, that thinking is still present. It was behind the spurt of diplomacy, at least in terms of how the Chinese government

although they were wary of a lot of it, but they were basically supportive of the last spurt of kind of constructive negotiation and diplomacy in 2018, where Donald Trump and the South Korean president Moon Jae-in were trying to come up with a formula to get Kim to agree to some level of denuclearization. But ultimately, they were trying to kind of normalize the relationships

take the hostility out and then use the carrot of economic development to really move things into a different space completely. And China was on board with that. I mean, China was not monkey wrenching it. They were getting a little annoyed that they were being left on the sidelines, but they were able to kind of manage that annoyance for the most part because it's fundamentally in their interest to have a, if North Korea could

could become a more prosperous country without being overturned, you know, without a color revolution, then that's a net positive for China. So why hasn't it happened then? Is it a lack of imagination? Is it a lack of maybe boldness from the Chinese side to not want to rock the boat? I mean, it does seem like they've already had the idea. Yeah, well, I think it's ultimately...

more about internally North Korea really being ready. And then the key external actors that have to facilitate it, really it's been the United States that has to give the go sign to the region, to the world. It's okay to trade with North Korea. I mean, right now it's illegal to think about

you know, sending a letter to Pyongyang. You know, I mean, literally U.S. citizens have to get special permission. You know, there's a blanket ban on travel to North Korea. I don't know. I guess it would have some competition, but it's, if not the most, among the most sanctioned countries, you know, on the planet. And so it's pretty hard to normalize your economy if you're under that kind of scrutiny from

Treasury. You know, I'm on these email lists that new lists from Secretary Blinken of all these people that are being sanctioned for their connection with the DPRK, including Chinese entities. So as far as some kind of

normalization strategy for North Korea. It's really the United States that would have to give the thumbs up to that rather than China supporting it. And North Korea has, again, not gotten to the point. It's been very focused on its security. And even if Kim Jong-un wants to do this, there would be a lot of people around him. He's got politics too, who would be extremely wary for a set of reasons. So the

They have agency in this and they have not really put themselves out there for a reform and opening moment. Right, right, right. Very much a chicken and egg problem. And it also brings to mind how and why Mao and Zhou Enlai had to conduct those negotiations with Nixon and Kissinger really, really in secret at the time as well. And so finally then, John, I'm mindful that we have to wrap up soon, but let's talk about the elephant in the room, Trump and the Trump presidency. We're talking just a few days after the election.

Big question. How will the Trump presidency change these dynamics? Yeah. You know, a way into the... Perhaps we can start with Ukraine first. Because I'm mindful that that's such a big question. But maybe with the Ukraine war, you know, what we do know from President Trump, elect Trump, is that he is thinking about...

ending the war soon. And that probably means some kind of compromise on the Ukrainian side. That means parceling away some of the Russian territories already, but also telling Putin just to stop. So does that then immediately change the impetus for Putin to have this kind of North Korean support? Well, there are huge impediments, right, to Trump delivering on that particular promise. He said, what, 24 hours of the war would be over. Yeah.

It's the art of the deal, John. It's the art of the deal. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, who knows in terms of he could trigger something. It might go nowhere. It might peter out. But, you know, the power transfer could trigger a change in the dynamics. I think it almost necessarily does trigger some kind of change in the dynamics of that war.

And we'll have to see if Vladimir Putin is ready to reciprocate that at all. But in terms of the North Korea piece and the China piece,

One thing it does, for what, let me say, Cindy, you can put me on record for this. I think in the things I'm reading on like foreign policy under Trump, the deluge that we are all swimming under right now, there's not too much on North Korea. Now, I realize I focus on North Korea, but I focus on other things too. And I think people are a little bit underestimating the possibility, I would say the likelihood that

Ukraine may be first, but that Trump wants this issue, and that he liked this issue for a good chunk of his first term. Even if it's really about a summit, like get me another summit with Kim. And that's not gonna happen in the first few weeks of the term, but like year one, something like that. And make it good. I would imagine if you're Donald Trump, you wanna go to Pyongyang, bucket list,

And now what are they going to talk about? Well, again, kind of the sooner it happens and even under probably an optimal scenario, it's not like we snap and the Ukraine war is over. They can talk about, can you pull your guys back from Ukraine?

Ukraine and you know, you know, you're Donald Trump, you know, I like Vladimir Putin and I have nothing against Russia and so this is not an anti-Russia thing, but I just really need to say I did this and can you help me out? And if you do that, you tell me what's he giving you? Maybe I, if it's money, maybe we can work something out. Maybe we can lift some sanctions. Maybe we can, you know, so there's a, there in a weird way, it gives a basis for some negotiation and

other than the just straight denuclearization, which is pretty much a non-starter for some of the reasons I alluded to earlier. So that's one way. In a funny way, Kim Jong-un has almost set himself up for something to talk about with Trump and kind of give to Trump, but almost in a coordinated way. Because, I mean, on the flip side, this could totally hit a wall because...

Kim Jong-un, most analysts believe, made a really strategic decision about going in with Putin and Russia. And so he's not going to pull out of that lightly. You know, the bar could be very high, but he might be willing to hear Trump out. And so at least there's the summit. That's one way in which these things could be connected in relatively shorter.

Yeah, fascinating. I mean, it almost makes me wonder if he did it as an opening gambit, seeing that Trump might come into the White House with this election to kind of, I don't know if that's giving too much credit. I wouldn't, I would say there are a bunch of reasons why the move of sending these troops makes sense for Kim Jong Un. And this would, this would be yet another one, you know, kind of another reason that it can play out.

well for him. And then this would be interesting, Cindy, if something along these lines takes place. Again, it'll be interesting to watch China's reaction, because I said earlier that China didn't try to monkey wrench the Trumpian diplomacy with North Korea, and they didn't. But there was also, you know, as they feel with North Korea and Russia, the military alliance, there was this annoyance and frustration of like, we're being cut out.

You know, the classic moment is when an inter-Korean agreement said three or four parties can meet to end the Korean War. By the way, that would be an interesting idea for Trump to say, I'm going to end the Korean War having ended the Ukrainian War. I'll go over and end the Korean War.

But when the two Koreas announced that, China got really upset. I mean, Wang Yi came out and did a press conference of like, you can't end the Korean War without us. But you could see something. Let me put it this starkly. I could see Trump, Putin, and Kim getting together for some kind of peace summit.

Easier than I can imagine Putin, Xi and Kim, who have never met. Despite all our talk of a bloc and an axis of whatever, why have these three guys never met? And again, we see echoes of Kissinger here because China is now the equivalent to the USSR. So you don't want to have China in the room. You want to have this kind of relationship building with Chinese partners in Russia and in North Korea. That's exactly right. It's fascinating. Maybe Trump could be...

the 21st century's Nixon. Well, now you see we've talked too long. John, it's a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers. Thanks, Cindy. I'm a big fan of the show and really appreciate being on.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Chinese Whispers. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're listening to this podcast on the Best of the Spectator channel, remember that Chinese Whispers has its own channel as well. If you just search Chinese Whispers, wherever you get your podcasts from, you will always get the latest episode first there.

If you have any feedback, positive or negative, but preferably constructive, please do email me at podcast at spectator.co.uk. And I'd also love it if you left a review or told your family and friends about the podcast. It's the way to help us grow. So thanks so much for listening and join us again next time.