Jinping’s concentration of power have come as an unwelcome surprise to many. There are also concerns about the suppression of dissent (often cloaked in the guise of Xi’s anti- corruption drive), the clampdown on civil society, and the repression of western China’s Uighur and Tibetan minorities. The net result is that it is now commonplace for official U.S. government documents to pair China with Russia and to speak of it as a strategic rival. All of which brings us back to North Korea, whose nuclear weapons and long-range missiles are viewed by China as a genuine threat – not to itself, but to its regional interests. China does not want a conflict that would disrupt regional trade and lead to millions of refugees streaming across its border. It fears that such a war would end with a unified Korea firmly in America’s strategic orbit. Nor does it want Japan and other neighbors to rethink their long-standing aversion to developing nuclear weapons of their own. The Chinese government also opposes South Korea’s missile defense system (acquired from the U.S. in response to North Korea’s missile deployments), which China sees as a threat to its own nuclear deterrent. The U.S. does not want to live under the shadow of a North Korea that possesses long- range missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads to American cities. At the same time, the U.S. has no appetite for a war that would prove costly by every measure. China and the U.S. thus have a shared interest in making diplomacy work and ensuring that any U.S.-North Korean summit succeeds. The question for China is whether it is prepared to put enough
pressure on North Korea so that it accepts meaningful constraints on its nuclear and missile programs. The question for the U.S. is whether it is willing to embrace a diplomatic outcome that stabilizes the nuclear situation on the Korean Peninsula but does not resolve it for the foreseeable future. A U.S.-North Korean summit that averted a crisis that would benefit neither the U.S. nor China would remind people in both countries of the value of Sino-American cooperation. And the precedent of the world’s two major powers working together to resolve a problem with regional and global implications might provide a foundation for the next era of a bilateral relationship that, more than any other, will define international politics in this century.
© Project Syndicate
Hank Blaustein | © 2013 Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Used by permission. www.GrantsPub.com
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