Throughout the 2010s, the official media of the two communist countries occasionally traded thinly veiled insults. Chinese citizens and businesses were often harassed in North Korea, while Chinese diplomats at the United Nations voted for increasingly tough sanctions targeting Pyongyang and, for a time, enforced these sanctions with considerable seriousness.
Beijing, of course, continued to value North Korea as a buffer zone, yet Chinese experts were even willing around 2010 to discuss possible compromises that might be implemented if the Kim family regime were suddenly to collapse.
Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping himself, long insisted on North Korea’s denuclearisation. During his first summit with Kim Jong-un in March 2018, Xi said this in no uncertain terms: “On the Korean Peninsula issue, China sticks to the goal of denuclearisation of the Peninsula, safeguarding peace and stability on the Peninsula and solving problems through dialogue and consultation.”
However, things changed in 2019-2020, when relations between China and the United States took a sharp turn for the worse. The confrontation with Washington prompted a fundamental reconsideration of Beijing’s policy toward North Korea.
China still has reasons to be unhappy about Pyongyang’s words and deeds, but the need to maintain a buffer zone against US forces in South Korea came to outweigh all other considerations. China does not need a domestic crisis in North Korea, it does not want to see North Korea’s collapse, or its absorption, East German-style, by a democratic, nationalist and pro-Western South.
North Korea’s cooperation with Russia is another factor to be considered. Its significance is often overestimated, but it has further increased Kim’s room for manoeuvre. Pyongyang would like to revive the policy of equidistance it followed from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Back then, Beijing and Moscow were bitter rivals, and North Korea benefited greatly from their quarrel, extracting aid from both sides while giving little in return.