Column: on North Korea (5)
[Column: on North Korea (5)]: Northeast Asia, entering into a New Age of Changeover
By Lee, Jung Hoon (MinPlus International Affairs division chair)
July 7, 2016
North Korea is striding with no hesitation at all after the 7th Workers’ Party Congress. North Korea, upon the decision of the Congress, is moving swiftly and speaking directly, not looking to left and right. Toward the United States, North Korea did perform the Mars-10 strategic ballistic rocket (missile) test and repeatedly demanded the ‘unconditional’ peace agreement and the withdrawal of the hostile policy toward North Korea. To China, Ri Su-yong, the Central Committee vice-chairman of Workers’ Party of (North) Korea, visited Beijing as an emissary of the Chairman Kim Jung Eun and delivered Chairman Kim’s autograph letter to Premier Xi Jinping. And to South Korea, with lightning speed, North Korea last month proposed ‘the great Unification convention of the whole nation’ and a joint conference of the South, the North and the Overseas Koreans as its one specific form.
Where is Northeast Asia heading, now in the midst of coexisting military tension rise and various conversing suggestion in disarray? Are North Korea and the United States again going down to ‘the chicken game’, or are they stepping toward the peace agreement? Is the Northern-Chinese relationship proceeding to the recovery of blood alliance over the nuclear matter? Why North Korea and Russia are coming closer to each other despite the UN sanction against North Korea?
Statements of North Korea before and after the 7th Workers’ Party Congress
On the 22th last month (after the 7th Party Congress) in Beijing, the 26th NEACD which is a half civic and a half governmental (1.5 track) took place there, with the six-party talks chief delegates or vice-chief delegates attending. There, according to Yonhap News, the North Korean deputy representative Choi Sun-hee declared, “Do not even touch the nuclear weapons we have made. It (denuclearization) is the matter to discuss after the US hostile policy has ended.” He also claimed, “We do not have any intention to have any meeting discussing about North Korea’s denuclearization.” He is also known to have said, “The six-party talks have died.”
Let us now recall the happening of the Wall Street Journal’s report on ‘the informal discussion on the North-US peace agreement’ this past February. The US Department of State spokesman John Kirby answered (to the request of S.Korean Hankyoreh Newspaper), “Obviously it was North Korea who proposed the discussion on the peace agreement. The United States, after having carefully reviewed the North’s suggestion, clarified that the denuclearization be part of the peace agreement. North Korea rejected this counter proposal.”
A while later in this past April, the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman (to the question of a N.Korean Central news agency reporter) replied, insisting, “There are some remarks such as the six-party talks or the two-track process of denuclearization and peace agreement in this so-dangerous situation of touch-and-go. We do not oppose communication itself but do strictly oppose any communication which is unequal. Due to the US hostile behavior, the problem of our nuclear weapons already left the communication table a long time ago. It entirely depends on the attitude of the United States whether to solve the problem through communication and negotiation or through some other way.”
Summing up, we can interpret the attitude of North Korea after the 7th Congress as: (1) The North does not oppose talks itself, but it seems not to have any intention to proceed with any talk (like the 9.19 Joint-Agreement in the past) which switches denuclearization and peace agreement with each other. It accordingly rejects the Chinese proposal of the two-track process of denuclearization and peace agreement. (2) Peace agreement is to be proceeded with as unconditional agreement separately from denuclearization. In other words, North Korea will not beg for peace agreement nor handle nuclear problem as the pre-qualification for peace agreement. (3) If the United States postpones unconditional peace agreement, North Korea will go with ‘force to force’, not focusing only on peace agreement. The State intends to end the current cease-fire situation (which is neither war nor peace) in near future, through strengthening its warfare capacity against the United States, reinforcing its ‘nuclear to nuclear’ high-speed nuclear military power.
The Mars-10 rocket test and tension rise on the Korean Peninsula
The Mars-10 rocket test was in fact a North Korean style medium long-range ICBM launching test. Just as the worry of the United States, North Korea actually proved its capacity to attack preemptively the US footholds in the Asia-Pacific region with nuclear weapons. Now it seems that North Korea has a new typed long-range ICBM test left. Yet, through the Mars-10 test, North Korea can be said to have proved indirectly its long-range delivery capacity through which it can attack the mainland United States, about whose specific content now is to omit since Doctor Gang, Ho Je has explained it in detail in his article (“The Mars-10 Test Launching: What the Media have missed”).
The responses of South Korea, the United States and Japan after the North’s missile test and the Party Congress are, as usual, not communication but straightforward ‘force to force’ confrontation. The United States is strengthening sanction against North Korea through UN on one hand and is further empowering actual warfare atmosphere through South Korea- US-Japan joint military exercises on the other hand, simultaneously. Japan, having passed ‘the new security laws’, has re-adjusted itself as a ‘normal State’ which can perform warfare at any time, without the amendment of its ‘Peace Constitution’. The United States has in reality been establishing its long-cherished ambition of ‘the Asian version of the US-British alliance’ as such. South Korea, the United States and Japan performed their first missile alert exercise under the virtual condition of the North’s missile attack, on the 28th last month in Hawaii, and North Korea condemned it calling the South Korean-US-Japanese triangular military alliance. North Korea warned that it would bring a “new cold war.” According to a S.Korean broadcast SBS, the United States also performed last month a nuclear-threatening attack exercise against North Korea, unprecedentedly dispatching two B-52 strategic bombers close to the Korean Peninsula.
New age of changeover in Northeastern Asia and the stance of the Chinese Communist Party
When summarized, the main decisions of the 7th North Korean Workers’ Party Congress are the utmost strong strategies that the State will adhere to its ‘independent route’ in the establishment of socialism and in the matter of unification, and that the State will expand and strengthen its strategic status as ‘the State with nuclear power’. China and Russia, the traditionally allied nations of North Korea, are in fact not friendly to the North’s independent route and have opposed it so far. Yet the dimension is now heading toward a place where the sort of opposition cannot be realistic any more. Conditions in Northeast Asia, due to a newly appeared strongly nuclear-powered State, are now going into complex circumstances where each State there has to make new transformative domestic decisions on the matter: each State has to found cornerstones upon which it will manage new order in the area for the next ten years, and the cornerstones will make the new foundation of the relationships between North Korea and China, and North Korea and Russia.
That China always strategically puts high priority on the friendly relations with North Korea is not rhetoric but a fact. What are traditionally strategic matters between North Korea and China? (1) Their mutual stances in regard to their different routes to the establishment of socialist States. (2) Their mutual stances in regard to the principle of proletarian internationalism and to the anti-imperialist route of international progressive-liberal group. (3) The peace system and ways to unification on the Korean Peninsula, and the political-military matter surrounding the Northern nuclear weapons. (4) The matter of their mutual economic cooperation and ideas-cultures interchange.
The matter of ‘various ways to establish Socialism’, the embers of the Chinese-former USSR confrontation in the past, does not matter anymore. The USSR collapsed, and China and North Korea each have been progressing on their own separate routes following their own ways. North Korea and China, despite the difference of their viewpoints on the ways toward socialism, both maintain their mutual respects each other. Therefore, only two matters remain now: the Chinese stance on the United States (imperialism) and the related Northern nuclear problem and the matter of actualizing peace system and the route to unification (on the Korean Peninsula).
When has the North-Chinese relationship of blood alliance fundamentally started to change? The turning point of the Chinese route for the establishment of socialism and its foreign policy is after 1978, when Deng Xiaoping (after Mao Zedong’s death) adopted the Chinese-style Socialist market economy and the policy of “reform and opening up”.
Regardless of slight differences in their viewpoints, it is not an exaggeration in a broad sense to say that almost all Chinese main figures (Hu Yaobang, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping) are pupils of Deng Xiaoping. There are several theories added to the Chinese Communist Party after Deng Xiaoping’s theory, but they all can largely be said to base themselves on the ‘the elementary stage theory of Socialism’. It is so-called ‘the theory of wealth first’, meaning that productive powers and industrial wealth be considered primarily for about one century (as Mark’s theory of productivity development priority) if underdeveloped societies like China are to establish socialism on a proper route. This is far different from Mao’s theory in the past or the socialist route North Korea is currently pursuing.
The characteristics of the Chinese socialistic market economy are in sum that China makes use of capitalistic elements and that it maintains mutual interchange and peaceful coexistence with main capitalist States including the United States for a long enough period. China takes the stance that it “hide its strength and bide its time” (taoguang yanghui), and then "slowly and peacefully rise to great-power status"
Accordingly, it appears that China has given up or deferred its previous line of the anti-America anti-imperialism and the traditional proletarian internationalism. The current Chinese socialism is in fact in the state as such. The current Chinese stance has even deepened after 1991 when the USSR and the Eastern Socialist Bloc collapsed, and China has adopted pragmatism and utilitarianism as its foreign policy, putting its practical interest matter up above everything else. A divided State itself, China officially normalized its relation with South Korea in 1992, trying to maintain equidistance diplomatic relationships with South Korea and North Korea. Since then, China is said to have dropped the principle of the proletarian internationalism in its relations with North Korea who China itself has called a blood alliance.
The nature of ‘the New-type of Great Power relations' is a pragmatic diplomacy for Chinese own sake
The terminology to understand the recent Chinese foreign policy is the so-called ‘A New-Type of Great-Power relations'. This means that now it is time for China to rise slowly as a great State, having gone through the age when it hid itself and was strengthening its power. The terminology first appeared in 2010 at the US-Chinese high-level contacts, which is basically a demand from China that the US and China now treat each other equally. This meant the G2 system, whose principles Xi Jinping arranged as the following and proposed to the United States in 2012:
1. Do not confront nor conflict with each other (the peaceful coexistence)
2. Respect each other’s ‘critical interests’ (non-intervention including the boarder problem with Taiwan, Tibet, and the South China Sea)
3. Avoid zero-sum games and cooperate for mutual benefits (the International cooperation)
Xi Jinping modified and complemented the relations into the 6 following principles and again proposed to Obama at their meeting in November, 2014:
1. Regulate and strengthen the high-level US-Chinese communication and interchange, improving the strategic mutual trust.
2. Upon mutual respect, one honors the other’s independence and territory, and does not force one’s own way to the other.
3. Expand interchange and cooperation in various areas. Establish the foundation of the two States’ relations through enlarging practical cooperation in divers areas such as economy, trade, military, anti-terrorism, legal action, energy, health and infrastructure and through producing activation in the governments, assemblies, provinces, media and think-tanks.
4. Constructively manage different viewpoints and sensitive matters. It is unavoidable to have different opinions, but both handle those in harmony via communication and negotiation.
5. Embrace and cooperate in the Asia-Pacific area. The Pacific Ocean is large enough to embrace both States.
6. Confront together against various regional and global challenges. China mutually assists the United States in such matters as the Iranian nuclear problem, the North Korean nuclear problem, Afghanistan, anti-terrorism, climate change and epidemics.
The essence of ‘the New-type of Great Power relations’ is in a phrase the Chinese pragmatic coexistence line with the United States, which means to give up its anti-imperialist route. The United States does not really enjoy the relations that realistically admits the rising of China but does intend to actively make the most use of the relations simultaneously. What to look into is that there is the North Korean nuclear matter on the list of ‘the global challenges’, the last one among the Chinese-US international cooperation lists. This is that the North Korean nuclear matter is the Chinese-US mutual problem which challenges G2 and the world order.
Contrary to the Chinese expectation, The United States respects the relations only when the State needs it. As seen in the recent case of the THAAD (MD) arrangement matter in South Korea and in the fact that the United States has interrupted the Chinese territorial conflicts in the South China Sea, the New-Type of Great Power relations China proposed to the United States seems almost a pathetically unilateral hope from the Chinese side. Accordingly, China now cannot avoid cooperating with North Korea and Russia in the matters.
A recent meeting of Xi Jinping and Ri Su-yong (N.Korean emissary) shows the current North Korean-Chinese relationship. In regard to the meeting, the Chinese Huánqiú Shíbào (the global times) reported, “Despite the difference in the stances of North Korea and China surrounding the North Korean nuclear matter, it is ‘unfavorable for both States’ that there are many outside forces intending to aggravate the relations of the two States, so raising tensions in Northeast Asia. It can be said that ‘The visit of Ri Su-yong this time shows that both China and North Korea have rationally avoided the sort of trap’.” China, over and above the North Korean nuclear matter, has made decisions in larger pictures, as can be interpreted.
The motivation and background driving the North Korean-Russian relationship
Look into the North Korean-Russian relationship is possible only when examining the previous historical background of the Russian-US relationship: it is the United States, paradoxically, who makes one driving force for the friendly relationship of the two States. Their recent relationship is the result of the US hegemony policy in Eurasia and its Russian ‘incapacitation’ policy. The United States has purposed, since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, to incorporate the former Eastern Socialist Bloc and the States previously belonged to the USSR into the capitalist market economy as swiftly as possible and to prevent Russia, the center State of the former USSR, from re-rising as a power State again. The United States has maintained the strategy to recruit the former USSR member States one by one into NATO, instead of dispersing NATO. The United States tried to block Russia’s re-rising as influential power and to divide Russia into several regions and eventually convert into a neutral State which cannot become powerful again.
The United States, after the dispersion of the USSR, proposed Russia to establish a partnership-relationship for peace, and Russia led by Yeltsin was full of a romantic expectation that it would take a role of one global planner toward the new century together with the United States. Yet in reality the US was calmly proceeding with its East-ward expansion policy, step by step, through recruiting Poland, Hungary and Czech first into NATO, excluding and isolating Russia.
The United States, making use of the pro-Western Yeltsin government, led Russian economy to swiftly open itself to the West and privatize major conglomerates previously owned by the State. Yet, betraying the hope of the Russians, the political-diplomatic status of Russia and its influential power rapidly dropped down, and the Russian economy and the people's daily life fell more and more down into hardship. Putin can be said to have appeared on the stage with the people’s support through his slogan of ‘the resurrection of the Great Russia’ after 2000. Putin, against the West through a civil war (?) for stopping privatization, has protected the public sector. He carried forward the re-nationalization procedure in the so-called ‘strategic industry’ sectors such as military, electricity, aviation and nuclear power industry through M&A. As a result, the weight of the State sector in GDP has sky-scraped, and Russia started to block the US dispersion of the Russian defense power and its Russia-seizure strategy centered by NATO.
The Ukraine crisis in its nature was the crush, after the remarkable success of Putin’s policy, of the US Russian-seizure and isolation strategy and the Russian anti-US hegemony multi-polar order strategy. Ukraine, one of the center states in the former USSR which had previously possessed nuclear weapons, was degenerated after it had dismantled its nuclear weapons upon the promise of nuclear umbrella by the neighboring States, having lost its politically influencing power. The United States intended to recruit Ukraine into NATO through converting its pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych regime to a pro-US pro-Western regime. Russia of course properly went against this strategy which was trying to change its traditional friend-State into an enemy. The Ukraine civil war led the whole Europe to a confronting front like a new cold war again. The United States ordered the EU member States economic sanctions against Russia, simultaneously expanding its missile defense system against Russia, and the EU herb States like the UK, Germany and France joined the strategy the United States was leading.
In response to this, Russia chose to strengthen its strategies of ‘the resurrection of Great Russia’ and ‘its Oriental policy’. Accordingly, Russia changed the market of natural gas and oil, its main resources, from Europe to Asian States such as China and North Korea. This is the background on which Russia and China swiftly processed the gigantic gas supply contract (which they had previously postponed) that guarantees billions-of-US Dollar profits. Russia also drastically wrote off 90 % of North Korean debt, about 10.9 billion US Dollars (about 11 trillion 800 billion Korean Won) in 2014. Russia, as can be observed in Syrian War where it is expanding its influential power and intervention, again appeared on the international stage as one politico-military power State. China and Russia overtly say that they do not admit the Northern nuclear weapons and will participate in the sanction against North Korea, but internally and covertly they are in fact in dualistic and complex situation.
Historically, there are times when the state of international affairs rather than domestic ones is fluctuating and over-changing. Now is the like. The current Northeastern state of affairs is developing onto a level where the neighboring States cannot solve the matter of the nuclear weapons and the unification of the Korean Peninsula through their current policies, yet is to have the conclusion in close future.
About the author
Lee, Jung Hoon was the chairman to both the Punishment Struggle Committee of Gwanjoo Massacre Main Culprit and the Struggle Committee for the Nation, Democracy and People of Korea University (S.Korea) in 1985. After 3 years imprisonment for the occupation of American Culture Center in Seoul, he ran a laborers’ hall in Osan and Soowon (S.Korea). He finished the MA program of the Asia-Pacific Studies at London University (London, UK), and served as member of the politburo at the Democrat-Labor Party (S. Korea), education member at the United Progressive Party (S. Korea). He is now the chair to Min[people]Plus International Affairs division (Seoul, S.Korea).
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