Key Points and Summary – China’s new disarmament and arms-control white paper pointedly omits any commitment to North Korean denuclearization, confirming what Beijing’s behavior has signaled for years: it prefers a nuclear-armed “buffer” state over real pressure on Pyongyang.
-For decades, China shielded North Korea from meaningful sanctions and never imposed serious costs after nuclear tests, allowing Kim’s arsenal to expand outside any arms-control regime.
HWASONG-18 ICBM North Korea. Image Credit: North Korean state media.
-That choice now risks boomeranging. South Korea and Japan are deepening ties with Washington, investing heavily in missile defense, and openly debating counter-nuclear options.
-Rather than stabilizing the peninsula, China’s gambit may spur the very regional nuclearization it fears.
Beijing Gives Up on a Nuke-Free North Korea. South Korea Won’t Ignore It.
China released a new white paper on disarmament and arms control this week. The paper confirms what China’s behavior has signaled for more than a decade—that it has given up on the denuclearization of North Korea.
This is not surprising. China has never seriously cracked down on its ally in the past to inhibit its nuclearization and missileization.
Still, formally dropping the commitment to denuclearization in the North is sure to encourage those in the South who wish to counter-nuclearize.
China Has Never Been Willing to Impose Serious Costs on North Korea over its Nukes
North Korea’s nuclear program dates back to the 1980s. The first ruler of the North’s Kim dynasty—Kim Il Sung—had long sought nukes as a final security guarantee against not just South Korea and the US, but also China and the Soviet Union.
Nukes would allow North Korea to forge its own path, even against its communist semi-allies.
The Soviet Union briefly pushed North Korea into the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but Pyongyang began cheating almost immediately.
Then, when the Cold War ended, the Soviets/Russians lost influence over North Korea, and China, which stepped in as Pyongyang’s new patron, proved far less willing to twist its arm over nukes.
China made a passing effort to stop North Korea from going nuclear with its Six Party Talks. But when North Korea detonated its first nuclear warhead, during the talks, Beijing took no obvious punitive action. The Six Party Talks eventually fizzled, and efforts to block North Korea’s nuclearization shifted to sanctioning the country.
The idea was to punish North Korea harder with each test, progressively raising the costs of its arsenal development.
The sanctions arguably slowed the North Korean nuclear march. Pyongyang would almost certainly have even more nukes now if the country were left unsanctioned.
But China’s regular refusal to fully implement the sanctions undercut their effectiveness. China has long understood North Korea as a ‘buffer‘ between it and the democracies of South Korea, Japan, and the US.
Its refusal to make a serious effort to hinder North Korean nuclearization tells us that propping up the buffer is more valuable than keeping it nuke-free.
That is, China appears to have made the calculation that a nuclearized North Korea is a risk worth carrying for the North’s utility in disrupting and distracting the region’s democracies.
The disappearance of denuclearization from this week’s white paper only confirms what was already fairly clear from China’s actions.
South Korea: Nuclear Weapons State?
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s logic here is understandable, but it will almost certainly backfire in the medium term.
He and China’s foreign policy elite seem to think the region will tolerate the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear power.
This is unlikely. North Korea operates outside the NPT, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and any other arms control framework. The world has, at best, a mediocre sense of what the country has built and how it will employ those weapons. And of course, North Korea is a known smuggler and proliferator. It would be a shock if South Korea and Japan were to accept this massive new danger on their doorstep.
And there are already signs they will not. Both have doubled down on the defense relationship with the United States, even with the ally-unfriendly Donald Trump.
That was ratified in the recent US National Security Strategy, which was far less tough on America’s East Asian allies than on European ones.
South Korea and Japan have also doubled down on missile defense, even as China complains that such defenses may target its deterrent too.
South Korea has gone even further. Its doctrine now includes preemptive strikes on North Korea if it sees missiles positioned for launch. There is also a robust discussion in the South to counter-nuclearize the North – an outcome China could hardly want but should have been able to foresee.
China Missed Its Chance, and Now Things Are Worse
China has been North Korea’s patron for decades. It had ample opportunity to crack down on North Korea – to really enforce the sanctions and make continued nuclearization more costly. It chose to look the other way, and now the region is much more dangerous than it was twenty years ago.
And it will get even more dangerous as the region’s democracies move to deter the North. China will come to regret this decision.
Author: Dr. Robert Kelly, Pusan National University
Dr. Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University in South Korea. His research interests focus on Security in Northeast Asia, U.S. foreign policy, and international financial institutions. He has written for outlets including Foreign Affairs, the European Journal of International Relations, and the Economist, and he has spoken on television news services such as the BBC and CCTV. His personal website/blog is here; his Twitter page is here.
