Kim Jong-un’s meet with Xi Jinping affirms China is pulling the strings in North Korea

One can only look and admire Chinese foreign policy. Just look at it, you build up an antagonistic state opposed to your biggest competitive neighbour. You buy raw materials and scientific resources from another neighbour and align them on to your side. And what one should consider the longest-standing foreign policy stratagem of Communist China, keeping the regime in Pyongyang under their control. North Korean leaders have been able to do whatever they like for years, particularly being harsh towards their own population for decades because the Kim regime is used to bare fangs at the United States, which is petrified of a nuclear assault on its two major East Asian allies, Japan and South Korea.  As a travelogue published in this newspaper last September pointed out, the situation in North Korea is hardly as bleak as the Western media paints it out to be, and definitely not as bleak as the severe sanctions imposed on the North Korean state would have made it. That is not just due to the ingenuity of North Korean ‘blockade busters’ but also the fact that China has kept North Korea afloat by sending energy resources and material goods into the nation. The visit of Kim Jong-Un to Beijing is not just a reminder of the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries but also affirmation that China likely encouraged North Korea to act out as part of Beijing’s overall policy towards the United States.

In the light of Donald Trump’s protectionist measures to address the ballooning US-China trade imbalance, Kim’s visit to Beijing is also a signal to a rudderless US State Department that if Trump wants a good deal with North Korea he will have to involve China. The question is not what Kim Jong-Un might demand of Donald Trump but what will Xi Jinping demand of the United States. Would he want the US to withdraw from their bases in South Korea and JapanIJ Or would China want a free hand to bully their South-East Asian neighbours in the South China SeaIJ Or would the new ‘President for life’ Xi settle for the status quo on tradeIJ The talks might be between North Korea and the United States, but China will be pulling the strings towards an outcome that it favours, and the last thing China wants is a nuclear conflagration on its north-eastern border with massive fallout over large population centres and the inevitable disruption of the global supply chain. However, it is telling that instead of lurking in the shadows, China has come out in the open to admit that they control the table, the cards, and the dealer. And as any gambler knows, the house always wins.