BEIJING — In the days after Kim Jong-Il’s death, China’s most powerful leaders hurried to the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, where they fanned across its parquet floor and bowed three times to Kim’s portrait. One Chinese state councilor was “hardly” able to keep back tears, North Korea’s state-run news agency later said.
The show of public support lasted more than a week, with odes to the “Dear Leader” and congratulations to the young heir, Kim Jong-Un. But the message also was noteworthy for what it lacked: China said almost nothing about how North Korea’s new leadership should run or reform the country.
Pyongyang’s precarious power transfer has narrowed China’s goals on the Korean Peninsula, experts here say, turning Beijing from a benefactor and adviser into a protector — concerned foremost with preventing collapse, not pushing for improvement.
During Kim Jong-Il’s final years, China drew North Korea close but also pressed for economic reform. Now, China has a shorter list of priorities. It wants North Korea to stay afloat and to help Kim Jong-Un grow from a nominal leader into an established one.
China is trying to keep North Korea stable primarily by giving unconditional support to the succession and telling foreign countries to be cautious. Kim Jong-Un received a key endorsement Saturday from Hu Jintao, who sent a note of congratulations when Kim was named as North Korea’s top military commander. In the days after Kim Jong-Il’s death, the Chinese foreign minister had called his counterparts in Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States to urge “stability” in dealings with the North, the Beijing government reported.
Among the targets of that message was the U.S. State Department’s top Asia diplomat, Kurt Campbell, who was dispatched Tuesday on a three-city tour — Beijing, then Seoul, then Tokyo — largely to discuss strategy on dealing with Pyongyang’s new “Great Successor” and his cadre of backers.
“China wants no war and no chaos,” said Jin Canrong, an associate dean of international studies at the Renmin University of China. “It still wants economic reform and denuclearization as well, but those are distant third priorities.”
For the short-term, government officials in South Korea and the United States don’t mind the Chinese approach: They would prefer the stability of a dictatorial North Korean government to the chaos of a failing one.
But that is the extent of their common ground. Stocked with nuclear weapons, long-range missiles and a 1.2-million-member military, North Korea represents a security threat to Washington and its closest Asian allies, Japan and China. Beijing, though, considers North Korea a security buffer against the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.
