Китай призывает Южную Корею к «независимости и автономии» в противовес альянсу с США

After Japan’s defeat of the Qing in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japanese Prime Minister and Qing statesman Li Hongzhang signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Article 1 of the treaty stated that “China recognizes definitively the full and complete independence and autonomy of Korea, and in consequence the payment of tribute and the performance of ceremonies and formalities by Korea to China, in derogation of such independence and autonomy, shall wholly cease for the future.” By eliminating Qing influence over Korea, the treaty paved the way for Japan’s colonial rule. For China, it was a salient moment in what it calls its “century of humiliation.” Under President Xi Jinping, China seeks the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” which involves restoring the East Asian order that existed before the First Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s statement on the outcome of the Korea-China foreign ministers’ meeting in Seoul on Aug. 19 contained a striking demand from Foreign Minister Wang Yi (who also serves as director of the Chinese Communist Party’s Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs): Korea should pursue “independence and autonomy.” “We hope the ROK side will begin with its own fundamental interests and develop foreign relations with independence and autonomy and without mutual contradiction,” Wang said. The first time Wang made that demand was in a meeting with then Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin in Shandong, China, in August 2022. Wang told his Korean counterpart to uphold “five imperatives,” the first of which was to “hold to a line of independence and autonomy and reject external interference.” In essence, Wang was calling on Korea to draw back from its alliance with the US and strengthen strategic cooperation with China. Wang’s official visit to South Korea last week, his first in five years, came as the ROK-US alliance was being rattled as never before. US President Donald Trump insulted the ROK-US alliance by downsizing a joint military exercise with a single social media post even as he openly wooed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, offering to tolerate Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal in exchange for dialogue. That must have given Wang plenty of food for thought during his stay in South Korea. “President Lee Jae Myung has chosen the right path, and our bilateral relations are improving,” said Wang, stressing the recovery of Seoul-Beijing relations, which had sharply deteriorated under former President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was removed from office last year. But Wang was not keen on Seoul’s request for China to act as a mediator in bringing North Korea back to dialogue and persuading it to pursue denuclearization. When asked whether China would broker the talks with North Korea sought by Trump, Wang said that was “a matter for North Korea and the US to decide” while arguing that Washington should first abandon its “policy of hostility” toward Pyongyang. There was a time when China embraced its role as mediator and sustained dialogue whenever the North Korean nuclear talks faced a crisis. When the US asked China to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table during the second North Korean nuclear crisis in 2002, China dispatched Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo as a special envoy to bring North Korean leader Kim Jong-il around. China’s mediation led to talks between the three countries in Beijing in April 2003. Those trilateral talks were eventually joined by South Korea, Russia and Japan, becoming the six-party talks. That was an era when US President George W. Bush, preoccupied with the US’ invasion of Iraq and “war on terror,” viewed China as a “responsible stakeholder” that could be basically entrusted with Asian affairs, including the North Korean nuclear issue. When China overtook Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy in 2010, Washington grew more wary about its rapid rise and sought to contain Beijing through the “pivot to Asia.” The era of US-China cooperation was over. Around the same time, Kim Jong-un came to power in North Korea and devoted more resources toward expanding its nuclear arsenal. Then after Trump took office in 2017, US-China relations shifted to full-fledged hegemonic competition and conflict — a dynamic that remains in place today. China is no longer interested in mediating to bring North Korea into talks with the US or South Korea. Instead, it’s making far broader and more complex strategic calculations: how to expand its influence on the Korean Peninsula amid competition with the US, and how to use the two Koreas in its efforts to bring Japan to heel. Xi’s choice of North Korea for his first foreign visit this year (and his first visit there in seven years) was highly symbolic. As he began his visit on June 8, Xi declared that China-North Korea relations stood “at a new historical starting point” in a signed article published in the Rodong Sinmun, the official organ of North Korea’s ruling party. China is no longer focused solely on strengthening its relationship with North Korea. While reaffirming that it retains the initiative on Korean Peninsula affairs despite Pyongyang’s closer ties to Moscow, Beijing is using Moscow and Pyongyang to send multiple messages to South Korea, the US and Japan. China is condemning Japan’s push for rearmament as resurgent militarism and pressuring Tokyo not to intervene in the Taiwan issue. At the same time, it seeks to weaken trilateral cooperation among South Korea, the US and Japan. North Korea, which is fully aware of China’s intentions, has also become vocal in condemning Japanese militarism. Zheng Jiyong, a professor at Tianjin Foreign Studies University and a leading Chinese authority on the Korean Peninsula, delineates China’s vision of itself as the arbiter of the Korean Peninsula order in his article “Why China Worries About North Korea,” which was published in Foreign Affairs on Aug. 10. “North Korea’s external strategy has evolved from one in which it leaned on China to balance pressure from the United States to a three-pronged arrangement in which it uses China to stabilize its economy, Russia to supplement its security, and US pressure to justify its nuclear program,” Zheng writes. “China’s new strategy,” Zheng says, “aims to draw Pyongyang back into its orbit and make the bilateral relationship more stable and manageable.” He emphasizes that China does not want North Korea to collapse, nor has it abandoned its long-term goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. “A nuclear North Korea is hardly ideal, but pressuring an unpredictable Pyongyang in ways that could lead to outright conflict is far worse. Crisis prevention and the need for stability are now China’s top priorities on the Korean Peninsula,” Zheng writes. With North Korea emboldened by military cooperation with Russia, China seeks to use it as a strategic asset in its competition with the US without destabilizing the Korean Peninsula. That amounts to a strategy of disrupting Washington’s encirclement of China with North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles while ensuring they don’t prompt South Korea or Japan to augment military cooperation with the US or acquire nuclear weapons of their own. That’s the context of China’s demands for South Korea to distance itself from Japan as much as possible. It also helps explain Wang’s emphasis during his Aug. 20 meeting with South Korean national security adviser Wi Sung-lac that “it is necessary to remain highly vigilant against the rhetoric and actions of Japan’s right-wing forces that seek to turn back the wheel of history” and that “the resurgence of Japanese militarism must never be allowed.” “China isn’t seeking to immediately pull South Korea away from its alliance with the US,” said Bek Bum-hym, a visiting professor at Seoul National University Asia Center. “Rather than trying to make South Korea ‘pro-China,’ China’s practical objective for now is to push Seoul to take on ‘strategic autonomy’ and prevent its alliance with the US and trilateral cooperation with the US and Japan from developing into an ‘Asian NATO’ aimed at China.” But Trump’s rush to resume dialogue with Kim as a way of diverting attention from his quagmire in Iran is complicating China’s calculations. “China is always ambivalent about the idea of a North Korea-US summit. While that would help stabilize the situation, direct dealings with the US raise the risk that Pyongyang will slip out of China’s control,” said Chang Yong-seok, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “China doesn’t explicitly oppose North Korea-US dialogue but would like it to proceed at a pace and scope it can manage,” Chang added. Of course, China could be induced to act if Trump makes major concessions on Taiwan or other issues in his upcoming summit with Xi, who will visit the US next month. In effect, the price of Chinese “mediation” has risen considerably. Also noteworthy was Wang’s reference to South and North Korea being “two states” on several occasions during his visit to the South. The Chinese Foreign Ministry reported that Wang said China wants to see “the two states” gradually move toward peaceful coexistence and ultimately achieve lasting stability on the peninsula. This isn’t the first time China has referred to South and North Korea as “two states.” But now that North Korea has enshrined the “two states” narrative in its constitution, it will be interesting to see whether China adopts that expression as its standard formulation. That would effectively renege on China’s pledge to support the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula by the Korean people (as articulated in Article 5 of its 1992 joint statement establishing diplomatic relations with South Korea). Wang’s repeated emphasis on Korea’s “independence and autonomy” should not be understood as a demand for an immediate end to the ROK-US alliance. In the long term, however, China presumably envisions Korea drifting away from that alliance and into China’s sphere of influence. Meanwhile, Trump’s crude and insulting treatment and pressure tactics are driving American allies to build up their own capabilities, devote more effort to multilateral cooperation in their respective regions, and distance themselves from Washington’s efforts to contain China as the “Trump paradox” becomes a reality. Wang’s visit helped clarify areas where Korea and China can cooperate, as well as areas where they face significant differences. The two countries should cooperate more closely on maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and managing a nuclear-armed North Korea, as well as on practical matters such as supply chains, trade, and people-to-people exchange. But South Korea and China have different strategic objectives. Amid the Trump-induced crisis in the ROK-US alliance, turmoil in the world order, and North Korea’s continuing buildup of nuclear and conventional weapons, South Korea will seek greater strategic freedom and give more thought to “independence and autonomy” — but not necessarily the kind China is urging it to pursue. By Park Min-hee, senior staff writer Please direct questions or comments to [[email protected]]