Kim family regime<\/a> were suddenly to collapse.<\/p>\nChinese leaders, including Xi Jinping himself, long insisted on North Korea\u2019s denuclearisation. During his first summit with Kim Jong-un in March 2018, Xi said this in no uncertain terms: \u201cOn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s policy toward North Korea.<\/p>\n
China still has reasons to be unhappy about Pyongyang\u2019s 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\u2019s collapse, or its absorption, East German-style, by a democratic, nationalist and pro-Western South.<\/p>\n
North Korea\u2019s cooperation with Russia<\/a> is another factor to be considered. Its significance is often overestimated, but it has further increased Kim\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Throughout the 2010s, the official media of the two communist countries occasionally traded thinly veiled insults. Chinese citizens…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[134,28922,1492,141,31,154,34,2785,414,137,76,1334],"class_list":["post-50063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-north-korea","tag-china","tag-comment","tag-defence","tag-kim-jong-un","tag-korea","tag-news","tag-north-korea","tag-opinion","tag-politics","tag-russia","tag-world-news","tag-xi-jinping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}