Will China intervene in North Korea?
If China intervenes in North Korea, it would not to be to save Kim Jong-un.
North Korea is in the headlines — again. For a small, poor country of 25 million people, it sure does make a lot of news. This time it’s the perennial issue of nuclear testing. North Korea has tested five nuclear devices since 2006. Donald Trump is in no mood to allow a sixth.
Just days before his Florida summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump vowedthat “if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.” Then, just after the summit, he backed up his pledge by ordered an aircraft carrier strike group to the region.
Most people agree that North Korea is a problem. Aside from its nuclear tests, it also stands accused of state-sponsored counterfeiting of foreign currencies, the industrial-scale manufacture and sale of illicit drugs, and even of assassinating its own citizens in foreign countries.
But why is North Korea China’s problem in particular? China is North Korea’s only major diplomatic ally, but the relationship is fraught with difficulties. How did China get saddled with such a troublesome partner? The history of the relationship runs much deeper than most people realise.
The first Korean War
China fought in the Korean War of 1950–53. In 1950, the new communist regime in China invaded the country with nearly three million troops, losing some 180,000 soldiers in the war. All this happened barely a year after the end of China’s own civil war in 1949.
China didn’t participate in North Korea’s initial invasion of the South. It intervened after Douglas MacArthur’s United Nations troops defeated the North Koreans and launched a counter-invasion of the North. The UN army was virtually on the border with China before China unexpectedly invaded and pushed south to the line that still divides the two Koreas to this day.
The last thing China wants is a united Korea under South Korean leadership.
But the 1950–53 Korean War wasn’t the first Chinese intervention in Korea. In a distant precursor to the 1950s, a very similar drama played out way back in the 1590s.
In 1592, Japan invaded Korea at Busan and rapidly drove up the peninsula to the Chinese border, prompting an intervention from China. The Chinese army pushed the invaders back south, liberating Pyongyang but reaching a stalemate just north of Seoul, roughly where the demilitarised zone stands today. The conflict ended with a negotiated withdrawal of Japanese troops in 1593.
Japan went on to invade Korea again in 1597, but Korean forces repelled the attack with Chinese support. For the next three hundred years, Korea was a kind of a Chinese protectorate, first as China’s closest “tributary” state and later as an ally in the resistance against Western and Japanese colonialism.
In 1894, Japan invaded Korea again, this time as part of the larger 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. And again Chinese troops made their major stand at Pyongyang. But this time they lost, and by 1910 Korea lost its independence entirely. It became a colony of Japan and suffered a 25-year military occupation which poisons Japanese-Korean relations to this day.
