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Connectivity in Northeast Asia
Connectivity in Northeast Asia
October 19, 2022

China and its Northeast Asian Neighbors

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U.S.-China Nexus Podcast

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China’s increasingly global outlook has been felt all around the world, but especially by its closest neighbors in Northeast Asia. 

Trade, as well as historical and cultural tries, bind China to Japan, North Korea, and South Korea. But, North Korea’s nuclear pursuits, China’s position on Taiwan, and U.S. defense treaties with Japan and South Korea have the potential to destabilize the region. Darcie Draudt, Ankit Panda, and Ayumi Teraoka join the show to explore the complex economic and security dynamics between China and its neighbors.

Eleanor M. Albert: Today, we are joined by three top-notch guests to talk about China’s relationship to Northeast Asia: Ankit Panda, Darcie Draudt, and Ayumi Teraoka. Welcome to the show! Before we dig into policy questions, I wanted to start by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about how you entered this policy space and how China factors into your own work. Let's start with you, Ayumi.

Ayumi Teraoka: Thank you so much! I was born and raised in Tokyo and the first time I came to the United States was when I was 16 years old, as an exchange student. I lived in Monterey, California with a big family with [U.S.] Navy affiliation. There was a naval post-graduate school in Monterey and so the friends I would meet from high school were also from Navy families. They served in Yokosuka, Sasebo, Okinawa. Which was interesting to me, because growing up in Tokyo, I didn't meet anybody in uniform or U.S. serviceman or woman. But I was always interested in politics in Japan and understood that for a country like Japan, the alliance with the United States was very important. But there was a disconnect between me understanding that the alliance was important, but never meeting anybody in uniform. I met them in California.

So I was trying to understand this disconnect, how this alliance functions, and how the U.S.-Japan alliance fits into the global U.S. military strategy. Then I got the opportunity to study at Georgetown University, where I met people like Mike Green who would teach the subject of U.S.-Japan relationship in the context of U.S. grand strategy in Asia and that got me into studying U.S. alliances as institutions, how they function, how we can maximize their utility. The question about China comes in here. In order to understand how to maximize their utility, you have to understand how China, North Korea, Russia see these enormous institutions the United States and its allies built over the decades.

So I continued to engage in the field. I worked at CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), and went on to pursue and got my Ph.D. at Princeton University writing a dissertation on the history of U.S. alliance management and how they interact with Chinese efforts to weaken U.S. alliances in Asia.

Eleanor M. Albert: How about you, Darcie? What was your road to studying not just South Korea, but the peninsula and the region as well?

Darcie Draudt: Now I'm a political scientist, but I come from an area studies background. My interest in the Korean Peninsula evolved quite organically. I moved to South Korea originally as a gap year after I graduated. I started studying the language, ended up loving it. Ultimately, I got my master's in Korean studies from Yonsei University in South Korea. When I graduated, I was very fortunate to get a research associateship at the Council of Foreign Relations. From the Korea studies desk, I was able to look at various aspects of their relationship, from security and geopolitical, economic, diplomatic, and even some of the social issues to a certain extent.

I got my Ph.D. with a focus on the Korean Peninsula, but from a political science perspective this time. When you study Korea, you have to study other countries. It's inseparable from the political context, no matter what you want to study. By virtue of studying Korean history, you also have to study China, Russia, Japan, and the United States. But China, especially over the past 15 years, with the question about the rise of China and what does that mean.

Eleanor M. Albert: To round us out, Ankit, what sparked interest in North Korea, and also Northeast Asia dynamics in general?

Ankit Panda: Like Ayumi, I was born outside the United States, but I grew up in a very strange, international way. I sort of had an Indo-Pacific upbringing. I lived in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and spent a little bit of time in Japan, in addition to some time in Europe. Growing up in that way, I think, inherently gave me an affinity for international affairs that eventually turned into an affinity for security affairs when I was an undergrad at Princeton, where I started zeroing in a lot on China. After that, I began my career and I ended up as an editor at the Diplomat, one of the sole publications focused on the Asia-Pacific region.

The North Korea piece was sort of a separate trajectory for me, but really being interested in security issues, nuclear weapons in Asia... Around 2013, not long after Kim Jong-un had been power in North Korea, I remember falling into the rabbit hole of North Korea analysis. This is a common story you'll hear from a lot of people who end up focusing on North Korea. By virtue of being a hard target for analysis, it does draw us in, in terms of what we can actually learn about a country like North Korea from the outside. It was obviously a major security issue in the region as well.

Eleanor M. Albert: With that context, let's just dive right in. China's ties to Northeast Asia are really deeply rooted in history and at the same time can also be quite fluid. So how is China's regional presence viewed in each of your countries of expertise from North Korea, South Korea to Japan? Ankit, let's start with you.

Ankit Panda: I like to start every conversation I have about China and North Korea with hitting the point that I think is a pervasive source of misunderstanding in the American foreign policy discourse about China and North Korea, which is that North Korea is in China's pocket, is an absolutely obedient Chinese proxy. None of that is true. It's really never been true, going all the way back to the founding of North Korea. One of the early historical incidents that I think has actually imbued North Korean strategic culture with a deep degree of suspicion towards Beijing, is the so-called 1956 August faction incident, when Kim Il-sung was almost overthrown by a faction of so-called pro-China Koreans in North Korea. From that time on, the relationship between China and North Korea has seen its share of ebbs and flows. It's true that the two countries fought side by side in the Korean War and that history continues to be an important part of how they each respectively talk about their shared historical closeness.

But since then, it's really been a rocky path under Kim ll-sung, under Kim Jong-il, and also under Kim Jong-un. To bring us up to the more recent history, China-North Korea relations are in a much better place now than they were during the first few years of Kim Jong-un's reign. But that took a while. It really took until the first meeting between him and Xi Jinping in March 2018. And more importantly, I would argue Xi's trip to Pyongyang in 2019, which again started to reorient the nature of the relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing.

Now in the current contemporary context with so-called great power competition intensifying, I think North Korea is more broadly reorienting itself towards Russia and China. But I think the most important starting point for any discussion of China-North Korea relations is to understand that it's far more complicated than North Korea taking its marching orders from Beijing. China cannot solve the so-called North Korea problem, but it will have to be, I think, a component of how the United States and other countries like Asia think about relating to North Korea.

Eleanor M. Albert: Is there a general ethos about how North Koreans or North Korean leadership feels about this behemoth neighbor?

Ankit Panda: I think there's a begrudging recognition that China continues to be a bulwark of stability for the North Korean regime. The economic relationship is one I think of true dependency. More than 90 percent of North Korea's overseas trade is with China. There's a recognition that I think alienating China, or doing things that would significantly drive a rift with Beijing, would not be in North Korea's interest. In 2017, when North Korea was carrying out all of its major missile tests and tested a thermonuclear weapon that year, Beijing’s support for international sanctions actually reached a new high watermark, where China was willing to affirmatively vote for new resolutions that significantly expanded the scope of what North Korea was going to be prohibited from internationally.

It's a relationship that has to be managed from the North Korean perspective. China's simply too important for North Korea's interests to be treated with sort of reckless abandon. But I think North Korea does take into consideration certain things, how they will affect the relationship with China, but it never overrides the country's national interest.

Eleanor M. Albert:  Got it. Darcie, how is China viewed in South Korea and Seoul?

Darcie Draudt: There are a lot of similarities with the South Korean relationship with the added element that it has a security relationship, a mutual defense treaty, with the United States. When I talk about how South Korea views China, first, I like to start with how the United States also misperceives the China-South Korea relationship. I think there's this narrative of South Korea having essentially a zero-sum relationship with both Washington and Beijing, that somehow if it's moving closer to Beijing, it's moving further away from Washington. In a certain sense, this is kind of like a twentieth-century Cold War mindset. Many policy elites in the United States see South Korea as having to make some sort of strategic choice between its economic partner in China or the historical relationships that it's had in the region and the United States, its security guarantor.

But Seoul's position is a bit more nuanced. Through the mid 2010s, Seoul's broad position was that it needed Washington for security guarantees. In fact, South Korea has benefited for its political development, its economic development in the second half of the twentieth century, largely because it didn't have to invest in defense. The United States provided that. So the global South Korea, the booming South Korea, that we see today really does benefit from that.

So that being said, Beijing has been South Korea's largest economic partner for the past, I think 10, 15 years. South Korea does recognize that both in terms of imports and exports, China matters. Now, the background of all of this: both the United States and China are trying to securitize a lot of these economic ties on other nontraditional areas, supply chains… Now, public health… Certainly the environment… What we're seeing now, based on some conversations I had back in August in South Korea, that while China is essential for all its goals, there's a wariness of both Beijing and Washington trying to securitize these previously non-traditional security areas.

The final point that I do want to make, is that since the 2016 introduction of the THAAD, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile arrangement in South Korea, again this was at the request and the cost of the United States, South Korea has received an enormous amount of backlash from China, both from Chinese leadership and from the general public. What that meant in the latter half of the 2010s is that Chinese boycotted South Korean products. At the diplomatic level there was a lot of censuring from the part of Beijing. So we've seen a bit of souring on how South Koreans are seeing China. If you look at public opinion data over the past 10 years, there has been a big shift in how the South Korean public, not to mention policy elites, are seeing Beijing. There is an increasing weariness about what is the stability, even in the economic relationship.

Eleanor M. Albert: Moving off the continent, into some islands. Ayumi, how does Japan view this regional presence that China has grown to embody?

Ayumi Teraoka: For Japan, China's regional presence is and has always been a matter of fact, but because Japan is an island nation and it has historically had ties with the Dutch, British, and Americans, it always had this maritime identity and having strong ties with the West.

The type of relationship Japan builds with China also shapes what it means with Japan to be a part of Asia and how it identifies itself as a member of Asia. China has always been a source of learning: a lot of cultural imports such as Buddhism and all those scholarly works thousands of years ago. But the same time, it has always maintained some sort of physical distance across East China Sea, so that it can build its own culture and distance, so that it doesn't have to be subjugated to Chinese order.

So now that East China Sea and this rough current have been lifted by the technology, Japan is now struggling how to maintain this goldilocks distance with Chinese and how to shape Chinese rise in Chinese power. But since the end of World War II, after fighting multiple wars between the two nations, Japan has been active proponent of engaging with China. Even in the midst of the height of Cold War tensions and even after Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, Japan has been a vocal advocate of engaging with China, because Japanese never believed that China could be just ignored. It has to be brought into international society, no matter what preference we have. And without engaging with major forces within China, if China is left alone, we can't really have a way to shape the trajectory of Chinese rise.

So even in 1990s and 2000s, Japan has had difficult relationship because politics were difficult with questions of historical memory and reconciliation, but economic ties were booming all the time and we had managed to find a way to stabilize political tensions and economic ties. But it is after 2008 when Chinese started sending government ships into the territorial waters around Senkaku Islands, what Chinese call Diaoyu Islands, that Japan started connecting the dots of Chinese maritime presence in East China Sea and a lot of internal changes within China and what's happening in the South China Sea.

So after 2008 has been sort of watershed moment for Japanese perception of China. Now after 14 years of struggling with a changing China, I think 80 percent of Japanese public, they all hold on unfavorable views of China. They all agree that China-Japan relationship is going badly, but they all agree that we have to find a way to coexist and have to improve the ties. I think the question is how? So if one public opinion poll gives them options to choose whether to engage with China or distance from China, the opinion poll is split completely. But if they're a given option to say cautiously approach Chinese, then they would almost immediately jump onto that third option.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's such a tour de force from all of you. What are the policy areas that bind China to each of these countries? Clearly economics are at the forefront. But I'm also really curious about what the wedge issues are. All of these relationships are managed in a somewhat delicate manner. So there are issues that do create a lot of consternation and that require careful handling to try and create some stability. Why don’t we start with you, Darcie. What binds China and South Korea, and then what drives them apart?

Darcie Draudt: There are immense cultural and historical ties that bind. So, I think it can get oversimplified, but the Confucianist kinds of traditions do affect worldviews in both South Korea and China. Again, if you look at public opinion polls or you look at sociological studies, even media in South Korea, there is a bit more of a global mindset. There is a question about, is it moving towards some sorts of individualism, liberalism, that kind of idea. So, this is something that I think is important for us to think about when we think about spheres of influence, because these social ties, cultural ties, and really a sense of worldview, where does Korea fit into the region, does matter. It does affect both the way strategic thinkers are approaching this, but also what sorts of domestic pressures are being put on those leaders.

Then the final one, the issue of North Korea and the Korean Peninsula's future, is both an issue that binds and drives a wedge between Seoul and Beijing. The continuing position of South Koreans, at both the policy level and more generally, is that China does matter when it comes to dealing with North Korea. This is different than saying, and the kind of fallacious view that Ankit presented before from the United States, is that China will solve North Korea. That's not what South Koreans view, but China matters in that Pyongyang's relationship with Beijing does set the tone for the ability, the extent to which North Korea can engage with South Korea.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is a certain amount of wedge that that can mean for South Korea, because if China is very anti-South Korea or it's wary of what the United States has as visions for the Korean Peninsula, then that’s a huge wedge. We’ve seen that in the past, both in terms of broader strategic outlooks that Beijing has presented, but also when we're coming to things like the now pretty much defunct six-party talks. Pyongyang was working a bit more closely with Beijing than it was with South Korea.

Eleanor M. Albert: Let's turn to Ankit, economics here, North Korea's dependent. That grounds the relationship in many ways. But it seems that these nuclear pursuits of Kim Jong-un have perhaps created a greater wedge?

Ankit Panda: The nuclear issue is the classic wedge between China and North Korea. Although here again, there's tremendous complexity. I think it's fair to say that over the 30-year history of the era, the denuclearization—we can date that to January 1992 when the two Koreas signed their joint declaration on de-nuclearization—China's overall position on North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons has been broadly negative. But I want to note again that there's tremendous nuance here. For instance, when the Pakistan metallurgist, AQ Khan, imported his centrifuge to North Korea, well, guess whose airspace he had to fly over? There's really no scenario in which China didn't know what was happening there between Pakistan and North Korea. So at sometimes China's turned the other cheek.

But the six-party talks were sort of Beijing's effort in the early 2000s to be seen as the regional leader in promoting diplomacy around de-nuclearization. They worked for a while until of course things collapsed spectacularly in the first few months of 2009. The reasons for that collapse we can get into, but my interpretation is, that really had to do with Kim Jong-il's poor health. He suffered a stroke in 2008 and I think becoming acutely aware of his mortality, his interest in proceeding with the six-party talks were significantly muted.

But I think there's an interesting change that's happened in how China thinks about North Korea nuclear capabilities under Xi Jinping. The Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras and how China thought about the nuclear problem on the Korean Peninsula has sort given way to a contemporary rethink.

China has in many ways, I think, made its peace with what a nuclear North Korea will represent in Northeast Asia. That's not to say that you won't still see statements from Chinese diplomatic forums like the NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) Review Conference, calling on North Korea return to the NPT. But all of the other behavior we see from China and if we look at what Chinese spokespeople at the foreign ministry and elsewhere saying before each of North Korea's six first nuclear tests, the message was clear. “North Korea shouldn't have nuclear weapons. We condemn these nuclear tests. They should engage in negotiations onto de-nuclearization.”

Now, with the so-called great power competition having erupted between the United States and China, and really everything on the U.S.-China agenda becoming part of the trade space, including North Korea, China has begun talking about how the United States should take North Korea's legitimate security interests into account in the context of discussing nuclear testing, which I think tells you just how far things have changed and how I think Xi fundamentally has a different assessment of North Korea as an asset, compared to a liability for China, when it comes to its nuclear weapons program.

I think this issue will remain nuanced, however. North Korea is moving towards tactical nuclear weapons, which I think China certainly won't encourage, given that it's not in China's interest to have a bunch of smaller, lower yield nuclear weapons floating around North Korea. One of the systemic concerns China has had since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing instability in North Korea, the famine of the 1990s, has been various contingencies involving either the collapse of the regime or systemic instability within North Korea that might cause anything from a military coup to large-scale refugee flows across the border. That is overall the largest wedge issue that people should understand on North Korea and China.

On the issues that bind the two countries. Here, geographic realities actually play significant role in how China understands North Korea as an asset. People debate the role of buffer states in international relations of course, but I think it is fair to say that North Korea historically has been understood by Chinese leaders as a bit of a buffer that separates North Korea from the presence particularly of forward deployed U.S. troops and military assets in democratic South Korea. So, China continues to have an interest in seeing the peninsula divided in the way that it is, even as the two Koreas, of course, pursue a unification as a longstanding objective.

That said, the two countries have a mutual aid and cooperation treaty, which was first signed in 1961; Article Two of that treaty does include a collective defense clause, it's the only collective defense clause that either country participates in, both China and North Korea. So you'll sometimes hear people make the point: China really has no allies in the international system. Well, strictly speaking, North Korea is the one Chinese treaty ally. There are various interpretations for how that treaty actually remains operational with North Korea having now acquired nuclear weapons. Unlike how the United States extends its nuclear umbrella to its allies, China has never made that clear to North Korea. China has a policy of no first use. But, the two countries commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of this treaty in 2021, of course long after North Korea developed nuclear weapons. That suggests that they do continue to see that as a valuable relationship.

Just one last issue, Eleanor, another really interesting dynamic, since Xi's June 2019 trip to Pyongyang, has been North Korea becoming a lot more vocal on issues that are relevant to China's core interests. Commentaries in North Korean state media on Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang. North Korea voting with China to the United Nations on issues pertaining to human rights. North Korea becoming much more vocal on Taiwan issues, in ways that absolutely adhere to China's positions on all of these questions. So it seems that the quid pro quo here has shaken out in a way that benefits both countries: China effectively providing North Korea with a degree of shielding at international institutions, and [North] Korea in turn speaking up for China's core interests.  

Eleanor M. Albert: Where does Japan fit into this? It might be hard to pick wedge issues here. There's historical complications and cultural diffusion issues, as well as territorial waters. But I'll defer to you, Ayumi…

Ayumi Teraoka: I think Taiwan is actually the most salient wedge issue between China and Japan. Japan's role in the defense of Taiwan through the alliance commitment with United States has never changed since 1960s. Japan has agreed to Article Six, Far Eastern clause, in the U.S.-Japan mutual security treaty, that U.S. has access to bases in Japan to use for the sake of peace and stability of Far East. And Japanese government has defined that Far East includes Taiwan. That position has never changed, even after third Taiwan Strait Crisis, or even today. The question is the plausibility of that crisis. In 1996, third Taiwan Strait Crisis, Japanese never were planning for actual conflict.

Now they are thinking about actual possibility of full-scale war over Taiwan. The more Japanese think about that possibility, the more they think that Chinese [would] have to attack Japan if they were actually serious about invading Taiwan, because there are U.S. bases in Japan, there are ammunitions in Japan, and Japanese will be forced into this war. Today, a lot of commentaries among scholars and experts are using this phrase, “contingency in Taiwan is a contingency of Japan.” That fact has never changed. In 1990s, Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro, the third Taiwan Strait Crisis, he was saying, “Can we just say that crisis in Taiwan is a contingency of Japan?” But now that debate is more on the public level and Japanese ordinary citizens hear about Taiwan contingency a lot, which is a significant change from a couple years ago.

So now Japanese have no choice but to prepare for war over Taiwan with a huge power like China, with United States, and that could include conventional war, but also nuclear war. Japanese have to figure out with Americans how to fight together. Japanese have never done that before. So that's a huge wedge issue, along with issues of history and politics that remain.

Binding issues, I think, are missing pieces these days. But this year, marked fiftieth anniversary of the Sino-Japanese joint communiqué that started that diplomatic normalization process. Usually, despite all the difficulties that exist in China-Japan relationship, when this anniversary occurs, there used to be a group of politicians who would stake themselves out and be a bridge between China and Japan and make this event as an opportunity to bring forward the relationship. I really don't see many politicians today doing that. There aren't many strong connections between China or Japan among LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] politicians. Maybe there are a few, but they are sort of dying breed.

It used to be that, because Japan used to provide ODA, official development aid, there were connections between Chinese officials, Japanese officials who managed that development aid, who were able to connect these two governments. That is also gone now that Japanese are no longer giving aid to China.

However, economic ties, business ties are still strong, even during COVID-19. China is still the top trading partner, and China is home to the largest number of Japanese firms abroad. But, when it comes to key technology, such as semiconductor, we are thinking about how to decouple economically, so that some technology will be more secure, while doing business with China.

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to touch on domestic politics within some of these countries. How much are Tokyo's, Seoul's, and Pyongyang's positions on China politicized in the domestic context?

Ayumi Teraoka: I think, in Japan's case, it is one of the countries that is least politicizing the issue of China. There is a huge broader consensus among Japanese public about the view toward China. There is very little presence of opposition parties and even among opposition parties and within LDP, the division of domestic politics is not foreign policy towards China. It's more about domestic politics or governance issues. Japan doesn't have this state where China issue is politicized. That presents an opportunity for Japan to maintain its cool head and think about, then what? Because it has been 14 years since 2008, where Japanese were still grappling with changing Chinese foreign policy and this question of history and historical memory as we approached the seventieth anniversary of World War II in 2015.

There was also deep anxiety about whether the U.S. position toward China was aligning with that of Japan Those questions are now settled. Now that U.S. and Japan are more on the same page about threat perception of China or foreign policies toward China, it's really the time for Japanese to sit down to think about how to engage Chinese, how to shape U.S. foreign policy toward China, so that the alliance can stay strong and approach China together.

Eleanor M. Albert: How about you, Darcie? I know there are a lot of other foreign policy issues in South Korea; how to tackle North Korea is often a big debate. How does China fit in? How does that dynamic play out in political discourse?

Darcie Draudt: I think that we can divide this along two dimensions. The first is public opinion, and the second is political system. Both of them are pretty big debates on how South Korea sees its relationships with its neighbors.

As far as public opinion is concerned, the relationship with North Korea is actually one of the biggest dividing issues in South Korean politics, as a partisan issue in South Korea. If you look at public opinion, public opinion towards China has been relatively high. Public opinion as far as country favorability rating is concerned, the United States is the biggest. Historically, number two has been China. We saw that actually dip after the THAAD debates that went on in the 2010s. But then in 2018, we actually saw North Korea supersede China for the first time. That was because North Korea had been meeting with South Korea for the first time in almost two decades.

The second thing is about the political system. The North Korea issue is historically one of the biggest dividing factors of contemporary party politics in South Korea. As it relates to the China question, historically conservatives in South Korea have been a bit more hardline toward China, and that's related toward a closer relationship with the United States. Whereas progressives have tended to be a little bit softer towards China and definitely more pro-engagement with North Korea, and that fits into its China policy.

This year, conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol came into office and he's considered by many an outsider. He's not a career politician; he was a career prosecutor. People saw him as a way to refresh what's historically been called the imperial presidency in South Korea. When we talk about the political system, the system is built so that the president's office has a ton of control over all sorts of policy, both foreign and domestic. This new presidency can not only set the tone, but also actually affect the way policies are enacted in South Korea. So Yoon Suk-yeol came into office signaling a stronger stance. He saw that the previous Moon Jae-in administration had been a bit too dovish or weak on the China question. So I think a lot of his supporters responded to that. They wanted a stronger approach toward China and a more internationalist approach, more generally.

Eleanor M. Albert: Ankit, are there political dimensions in the North Korean context that could divide as it relates to China?

Ankit Panda: I think politics exist in North Korea as they do in any other society. It's not really the case that Kim Jong-un is an absolute, total dictator, who controls everything inside the country, including the thoughts and feelings of people around him. We have a few incidents that I think showcase these rifts. I talked about the classic historic case of the August faction incident, which is very commonly cited to indicate the divergences that exist within the Workers Party.

Between China and North Korea, you have party-to-party relations, you have two Marxist-Leninist political systems, albeit with the North Korean case, much more moving towards so-called Kim ll-sungism and Kim Jong-llism. There are sort of debates about the role that other systems might play, that a society like China, what can the experience of the Communist Party of China teach the Workers Party of Korea? That has been sort of a contested area of discussion.

But more recently, two particular figures I think are interesting in the context of politics in North Korea with regards to China. These include Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un's uncle by marriage to his father's sister who was executed by Kim Jong-un, and Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong-un's older half-brother and Kim Jong-ll's eldest son.

The China angle here with both of them I think is just worth spelling out briefly. So Jang was an instrumental advisor, to Kim Jong-ll especially, particularly on the economic relationship with China. One year before he was assassinated, he traveled to Beijing, he met with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and other senior Chinese figures at the time. The reasons for his execution within North Korea, there are various accounts ranging from disputes having to do with how Jong was managing internal issues related to how North Korea operated its fisheries.

But more broadly, there are suggestions that Kim Jong-un saw him as insufficiently loyal to him, personally, and had concerns about the nature of what Jong was doing with China. These point to certain divergences within the North Korean system about how various figures see the role of China and the role that China should be playing with sustaining North Korea's economy.

The Kim Jong-nam case is another interesting one. Kim Jong-nam was the eldest son of Kim Jong-ll. He lived in China under protection of the Chinese state for the longest time, before, in 2017, being assassinated by North Korean agents in Kuala Lumpur International Airport. But the only reason I raised this is I think as Kim Jong-un was consolidating power, particularly in the first five or six years, one of the issues of concern was any external locus that might compete his own power within the North Korean system. So obviously having an older half-brother, who of course carried the blood of Kim Il-sung… having him stay in China, I think was a bit of a sore point in the North Korea-China relationship. The assassination didn't take place on Chinese soil. I think that again speaks to the sensitivities that might exist. I think that would've been a bridge too far perhaps. But nevertheless, the Kim Jong-nam episode I think points to another area where North Korea and China may have seen some difficulties that manifested in internal politics in North Korea.

Darcie Draudt: I really appreciate Ankit's insights. As someone who follows the Korean Peninsula, this is a question I think about a lot. I'm interested in thinking about how do we think about the North Korean political system and how that affects its foreign policy? That's a huge, huge question that we really do need better ways to understand. Following especially individual leaders, what kinds of policies they stand for, whether they are ideological…  

But one way to think about this and how I approach it as a political scientist, Patrick McEachern has this great article, “Interest Groups in North Korean Politics.” I think that's a really interesting way to think about it, because we think about interest groups in the Western or liberal democratic perspectives…There's necessarily some sort of civil society… But in North Korea, we have these very embedded institutions that are in the state. One of the ways to think about this is the difference between party leadership and military leadership. This is throughout North Korea's history, kind of like a negotiation that goes on. Who has the ear of the leader?

This is particularly important when we think about Kim Jong-un, took about five or six years for him to shore up his legitimacy, his authority. And one of the debates is, that Kim Jong-un has really sought to make the party a bigger part of the policy-making apparatus.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's super interesting analytically. To see another example of a rejiggering of the roles of the tripartite system, it's party, military, government, and they all embed in one another in different ways. China is no different. In fact, it has also seen the resurgence of the party becoming the pillar of policy.

I think this is a good opportunity to transition to the elephant in the room, as we are all based in U.S. institutions… Talk a little bit about the U.S. relationship to this region and also to bring these countries into conversation with one another? How does the United States and its broader Indo-Pacific framework shape regional dynamics vis-a-vis China?

Ankit Panda: One of the issues that I've been thinking about lately is the issue of horizontal escalation scenarios in times of conflict. My focus is very heavily on defense policy and security and nuclear weapons. The relevant set of interests in Washington is thinking about what are the odds that either opportunistically or in a collusion scenario… I find the collusion scenario actually rather implausible in the North Korea-China context… Opportunistic escalation I think is an interesting area to think about. What are the odds of North Korea deciding to take advantage of, let's say, a flare up intentions in the Taiwan Strait? We just sort of lived through this in August with Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.

There were questions I was getting at the time about “Is North Korea going to use this as a window of opportunity?” We haven't really seen evidence of this. So it's an area of inquiry that I think hasn't received enough scrutiny, and I just really want to caution that everything we know about the North Korea-China relationship suggests that opportunism is much more likely than the direct collusion between the two countries.

Eleanor M. Albert: Ayumi, given that you study alliance politics, I think they're pretty front of mind when there's so much discussion about, the U.S. has NATO for the West, and it’s much more hub and spokes dynamic in Northeast Asia. How does this kind of dynamic affect the way in which regional issues come to the fore when it comes to China?

Ayumi Teraoka: It is no question that U.S. presence in the region is fundamental and critical to Japanese foreign policymaking, security policymaking. There is no plan B or alternative way that Japan is thinking or likely to think to securitize its own defense.

That said, Japan is aware that U.S. has resource constraints, especially when there's a war in the European front. There's Russia that is complicating the scenes, both with the relationship with the Chinese, but also on the European front with war in Ukraine. Japan is quickly strengthening its ties with other U.S. allies and partners like Australians and Indians and Southeast Asians. I think Japan is also interested in strengthening ties with NATO. But these countries still have stronger ties with United States, perhaps except for India. But I think the fact that U.S. is still there matters.

So what Japanese want is really get the United States to continue to invest and maintain robust conventional and nuclear capability. And other diplomatic works, investment, and training maritime coast guards. But when it comes to, for example, extended nuclear deterrence, Japan is still pretty reliant on United States.

What worries Japan? I think, and it worries me personally, is the polarization of United States, making any policy choices uncertain going forward. So if United States’ polarization affects U.S. policy towards China, or spending on defense capability, that really worries Japan and I think many regional stakeholders, who are planning for serious Taiwan Strait crisis, or North Korean crisis, crisis on the Korean Peninsula. That said, I think the U.S. relationship to Northeast Asia and Indo-Pacific is still fundamental.

Darcie Draudt: It's interesting when you pair these two alliances, these are foundational to the hub and spoke system in the United States, you have Japan, you have Korea, and you have this continued question about what does trilateralism mean? It was interesting to hear how Ayumi talked about how Japan relates to other U.S. partners, Australia, India, ASEAN, and now even NATO. Certainly South Korea has these interests as well. Starting with the last administration in particular, the Moon administration had a “new southern policy,” they called it, and it was to seek to outreach to other countries in the Indo-Pacific that dovetailed with a lot of the long-standing U.S. shift to more greatly integrate into region’s security and geopolitical questions.

And yet the South Koreans interpret this quite a bit differently because, I think, of its continued state of war with North Korea. So the alliance with the United States is quite different than the alliance between Japan and the United States in that the United States provides the foundation for Japan, its Self-Defense Forces, whereas in South Korea there is a really strong move toward interoperability, how U.S. posture on the peninsula would help deter a North Korean attack, while also serving in a greater vision of peace.

You have to remember South Korea's constitution, Article Three, envisioned the Korean state as the entire Korean Peninsula and Article Four talks about the mandate, the raison d’etre of the state, is to seek peaceful unification in a democratic system. South Korea really still needs the United States in that reunification goal.

Eleanor M. Albert: I wanted to just get some final thoughts on, in the short or medium term, what do you see as the one big issue in the region [Northeast Asia] that concerns you or you are following the most?

Ankit Panda: I think the immediate short term, I am expecting North Korea to carry out the seventh nuclear test, possibly more nuclear tests down the line. I would be really interested to see how China's going to react in the aftermath. There's already pretty clear indications that China won't support a new UN Security Council resolution expanding the scope of the sanctions regime on Pyongyang. It'll be interesting to see if there's any indicators that suggest a growing rift between the two countries as North Korea moves towards deploying tactical nuclear weapons, which I think China won't be entirely comfortable with. Again, it's this nuanced story of the China-North Korea relationship.

Eleanor M. Albert: Go ahead, Darcie.

Darcie Draudt: I agree with Ankit. In the spirit of not repeating it, I think that watching how the China-Taiwan question starts to play out, not in the sense that China makes some sort of tactical move or commits to some sort of adventurism with Taiwan, but rather, I'm interested to see how other countries in the region respond, and perhaps misperceive what China is doing… I think that that gradual additive effect will be interesting to watch going forward. Taiwan, it is a contingency for the entire region, differently, and it has potential to drive wedges that didn't exist before or bring people closer together. Again, this doesn't necessarily have to do with any sort of actual move of forces, but rather a realignment of the region.

Eleanor M. Albert: Final thoughts, Ayumi?

Ayumi Teraoka: In the short to near term, I'm really looking at what two countries, China and Japan, can make out of this fiftieth anniversary. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning a lot of events and a lot of nonprofits also, but it doesn't seem to lead to any huge changes in mood. But it could be an opportunity for two countries to sit down with cool heads, without any fancy expectations, but really secure channels, and think about how to manage this relationship.

Eleanor M. Albert: About today’s guests:

Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An expert on the Asia-Pacific region, his research interests range nuclear strategy, arms control, missile defense, nonproliferation, emerging technologies, and U.S. extended deterrence. He is the author of Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (Hurst Publishers/Oxford University Press, 2020).

Darcie Draudt is a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She also holds nonresident fellowships at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS), the Korea Economic Institute, and the National Bureau of Asian Research. A political scientist and foreign policy analyst, Dr. Draudt publishes broadly on South and North Korean domestic politics and foreign policy, inter-Korean relations, and U.S.-Korea policy.

Ayumi Teraoka is an America in the World Consortium postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on coercive diplomacy, alliance politics in Asia, and Japanese foreign policy, including analyses of the U.S.-Japan alliance, the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance, the U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral defense cooperation, and the Japan-India strategic partnership. She was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.