China clings to its North Korean friend

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Being a superpower is supposed to guarantee friends and influence. China, the world's newest global power, has plenty of the latter. What it lacks – especially among the 14 countries that surround it – are solid comrades.

China's friendship deficit, created by anxiety over its ambitions, was made embarrassingly plain this week as its top leaders joined in the over-the-top mourning for Kim Jong-il. If China were a confident power, a bouquet of flowers from President Hu Jintao to the North Korean embassy in Beijing would have sufficed.

Instead, a remarkable procession was taking place in Beijing. Led by Mr. Hu and his anointed successor, Vice-President Xi Jinping, all nine members of China's all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo made their way to the Hermit Kingdom's embassy. Each solemnly offered condolences over the death of the man whose image Premier Wen Jiabao bowed to and praised as "a great party and state leader" and "an intimate friend of the Chinese people."

Despite seeing its economy grow tenfold in size and emerging as a diplomatic and military force exceeded only by the United States, China's clingy reaction is little different today than it was 17 years ago when Mr. Kim's father and predecessor, Kim Il-sung, died. If anything, Beijing needs Pyongyang more now than it did in 1994 – a testament to its isolation in East Asia.

Barack Obama's declaration last fall that Asia will be the focus of his administration's foreign policy has further complicated matters. The U.S. President backed up his commitment by deploying marines to Australia and renewing engagement with the suddenly reformist government of Myanmar. The American emphasis on the Pacific theatre has raised the paranoia level in Beijing to almost Cold War heights. China already sees Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan as part of a U.S.-led effort to encircle and constrain it.

Which leaves North Korea, Myanmar and Pakistan as China's only "old friends" among its neighbours.

That's hardly enviable company, and may be why Beijing believes it can't afford to be picky. By mentioning Kim Jong-il's son, the 28-year-old "Great Successor" Kim Jong-un, by name during his visit to the North Korean embassy, Mr. Hu made clear that Beijing will do its utmost to support the transition now taking place in Pyongyang.

The tributes in Beijing this week closely follow traditions established in 1994 when president Jiang Zemin led his Politburo members to the North Korean embassy. But in many ways the China of 1994 – then ostracized for crushing the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising – enjoyed more foreign-policy options than it does now. Kim Il-sung died at a time when China was pulling away from North Korea, establishing its first diplomatic and trade ties with Seoul.

The China of 1994 was concerned about what was taking place in Pyongyang, but not beholden to it. Today's Chinese leaders see the threat of American encirclement as their top concern and seem willing to sacrifice the hope of better ties with South Korea and Japan to preserve the regime they view as a strategic buffer against the United States and its allies.

As unpredictable as the Kim dynasty has been, China's top desire for the Korean Peninsula is the status quo. "China's core interest is to keep the peace," said Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of Modern Foreign Relations at Tsinghua University and one of China's leading foreign-policy thinkers. "I know a lot of people want to see some kind of war because of the death of Kim Jong-il. We just hope that this transfer of power can be carried out peacefully."

China fears that any kind of infighting caused by a succession battle would create a refugee crisis at its border with North Korea. The nightmare scenario that Prof. Yan laid out is a restarted Korean War, one that could easily draw in the rest of the region. (Ties between China and North Korea date back to the Korean War, when Chinese troops intervened to save the Stalinist state founded by Kim Il-sung.)

Beijing spends just as much time worrying about a rapprochement on the peninsula that would leave a united – and presumably pro-Western – Korea on its border, one that might even continue playing host to U.S. troops, as South Korea does now. So China backs the Kims.

The price of that loyalty has been high. Kim Jong-il's habit of detonating nuclear bombs – or attacking South Korean warships and islands – without consulting his ally frequently put Beijing in a diplomatic box, forced to choose between backing a madman or bending to the West and further isolating Pyongyang.

While Beijing publicly condemned North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, its reaction to the second detonation in 2009 was more muted. Suspicions over a U.S.-led effort to "contain" China were such that Beijing's only reaction was a repeat of its earlier reprimand. The soft line arguably emboldened the North Korean military; the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan and the surprise shelling of Yeonpyeong Island brought the peninsula to the edge of renewed conflict in 2010 before China finally applied pressure to its unpredictable dependent.

The Communist Party-affiliated Global Times newspaper this week referred to the headaches Pyongyang has caused for China, but argued that Beijing must do all it can to ensure a smooth transition of power there. "No matter how costly it is for China to stay friends with neighboring countries, it is better than dealing with a worsened strategic environment."

"Beijing is going to make itself as useful as possible [to Kim Jong-un]" said Stephanie Kleine Ahlbrandt, a Beijing-based analyst for the International Crisis Group who specializes in China's relationships with its neighbours. "The Chinese don't want to see this uncertainty leading to North Korea and the West becoming closer, for South Korea and the U.S. to use the opportunity to reunify the peninsula."

Some in Beijing would disagree. Some in the Commerce Ministry, for instance, must question the wisdom of risking China's fast-growing trade relationship with South Korea (which is expected to hit $250-billion next year, about 80 times the volume of commerce between China and North Korea) in order to support another North Korean despot named Kim.

But the organs of China's ballyhooed "soft power" effort – the Commerce Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – take a back seat to the more powerful People's Liberation Army and the hawkish foreign-affairs wing of the Communist Party when it comes to these decisions.

And when paranoid generals are left in charge of making friends, the sad result is the leader of a superpower bowing before a portrait of Kim Jong-il.