Southern Weekend Analyzes Kim Jong-un’s Diplomacy with Japan

By | April 09, 2014 | No Comments

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Image: KCTV

Reading the Chinese press is itself an exercise in abundance, one not necessarily accompanied by a great deal of resultant insight. This is particularly true concerning commentary and analysis about Japan. The PRC is awash in books, documentaries, newspaper and magazine analysis of China’s relationship with Japan that all leads to an inevitable conclusion: The Japanese state is populated with unbending and unrepentant rightists who seek to contain China’s rise, revise Japan’s constitution along with its militant past, and who wish to block the PRC at every turn.  The extent to which the Chinese Communist Party has embraced its predecessor in power, the Guomindang (KMT/Nationalists), as a historical partner in anti-Japanese solidarity and continuity is testimony to the depth and the power of this ubiquitous narrative reality.

When Japan engages in regional diplomacy, this narrative inevitably rears its head in the Chinese press. From the CCP perspective, Japan cannot simply be attempting to rebalance its historically awful relationship with North Korea, it needs to be doing so as part of a broader strategy to isolate and weaken China’s position in the region. Combining the omnipresent role of Japan in China’s state media along with its less-visible but increasingly emerging anxieties over how to handle North Korea, the Nanfang Zhoumo (hereafter Southern Weekend) recently created some interesting and genuinely insightful reading.

The piece under analysis was published on April 3, 2014, and indicates how carefully China is watching the regional diplomatic interplay, and how a closer DPRK-Japan relationship would threaten the interests of the PRC.  The subject of the article is the meetings which occurred in North Korea’s Embassy in Beijing on March 30-31. These were, as Southern Weekend put it, “the highest level diplomatic interaction between Japan and the DPRK since Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi went to Pyongyang in 2002.”

Interpreting the meetings is not child’s play. If North Korea and Japan move toward normalization, a great deal of recalculating has to take place in Beijing. Within the PRC, there are scores of experts who could comment on this matter, but there is but one academic voice given prominence in this article, and it belongs to Dr. Zhang Liangui, a professor at the Central Party School in Beijing, whose expertise on the DPRK is near the top of the list in China.

Zhang assesses the recent meetings between DPRK and Japanese representatives in Beijing as being grounded in North Korea’s material needs:

North Korea’s primary hope and goal with contacting Japan is to relax Japanese sanctions on North Korea, including the ban on remittances to North Korea and the ban on North Korean ships sailing into Japanese ports.

For North Korea, there is a big pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow, and the effect of international sanctions could be quickly offset by a massive influx of cash from Japan resulting from normalization, or just a resumption of remittances from DPRK loyalists and family members in Japan.

Quoting an “anonymous diplomatic source” in Beijing, Southern Weekend explained that “Japan has taken the attitude of not refusing to discuss the relaxation of sanctions on North Korea.” Double negatives like this are hard to read, but they clearly indicate that if Japan can receive partial satisfaction on the abduction issue front, there is some possibility of movement on the sanctions front.

The Southern Weekend article moves well beyond sanctions, though, and brings Zhang Liangui back for the following analysis:

But apart from this, North Korea is watching the tense Sino-Japanese relationship. There is also a possibility that North Korea, through such encounters with Japan, aims to pressure China to [take steps that would] “draw over North Korea” [back into the Chinese camp].  North Korea has been through the Sino-Soviet split, and when it learned how to find space to operate between two hostile powers.

The paper then goes on to interview Mr. Liu, who is described as “a Chinese businessman who has for many years operated North Korean restaurants in China and restaurants in the DPRK, and who maintains close contact with North Korean officials.” Mr. Liu states:

According to my observations [观察] in Pyongyang and contacts with North Korean officials, Kim Jong-un has decided to press forward with breakthroughs in areas that have previously been problematic for North Korean diplomacy. Because on the one hand, China has cited the nuclear issue for its multiple tactful refusals [婉拒] to invite Kim Jong-un to China, [highlighting the fact that] this man, who has no seniority in North Korea’s Party, government, or military, also has absolutely no diplomatic achievements.  On the other hand, because China has gone along with sanctions on the DPRK at the United Nations, this has caused Kim Jong-un to feel extremely perplexed, and, given the connection between foreign affairs and the internal politics of the Party, government, and military, it has given him a strong impetus to seek a “breakthrough” in the diplomatic field.  Apart from this, the economy means his hopes for diplomatic support are made all the greater.

This “Mr. Liu” is rather articulate, making one wonder if he actually exists or if he was simply sketched in as a way of making a rather pointed disclosure: Kim Jong-un’s physical absence from the diplomatic stage in Beijing has been at the impetus of the CCP Politburo, and not his own fear of travelling or unwillingness to meet with his ostensible counterparts and patrons.

Indeed, Kim Jong-un’s recent plane ride to Samjiyeon, on the border with China, would validate such an interpretation – this is a signal to the CCP that he’s not unwilling as his father was to simply get on a plane to Beijing or anywhere else that Xi Jinping would like to meet.

The aside about Kim Jong-un’s inexperience is rather pointed in “Mr. Liu’s” remarks; Kim Jong-un is surely looked down upon by the Chinese leaders, who are neither impressed nor moved by the explosion of cult-of-personality culture in the DPRK in the aftermath of the Jang Song-taek execution.

The semi-anonymous source having done his damage, Zhang Liangui returns to the article with the following comment:

The third North Korean nuclear test of February 2013 was a turning point [转折点 ] in the course of events. North Korean diplomacy underwent a change thereafter. Before, North Korea hoped to use talks to mix and engage with surrounding countries, seeking to win time for their research of nuclear weapons. But after the third nuclear test, North Korea declared that it had already developed miniaturized and diversified nuclear means, and that it already considered itself a nuclear state. Therefore, it hoped and sought for other countries to recognize it as such, or tacitly [默然] recognize it as a nuclear state.

In May 2013, Choe Ryong-hae travelled to China, hoping to soften China’s stance, but he did not achieve his goal. In June 2013, representatives from the US and DPRK met, but did not agree to talks. In July 2013, North Korea met with Russia, but there was no result.

Zhang Liangui goes on to discuss Japan’s diplomatic goals in reopening the channel to Pyongyang:

Japan has its reasons for talks with North Korea. One is to set up diplomacy with countries on China’s borders in order to effectively surround China. It’s as if they are saying, “Hey, China, you aren’t getting on well with North Korea? What’s the matter this time?” More important than this is the abduction issue, which has attracted great interest from the Japanese public, and which Prime Minister Abe wants to solve in the near term.

Dr. Zhang’s pantomime of a Japanese diplomat taunting a fictional Chinese counterpart about how badly things are going with the DPRK speaks volumes about the frustrations that North Korea is able to cause within the ruling circles in Beijing. China has massive needs and massive goals, and having North Korea as a kind of unwanted, angry, and unpredictable appendage does little to aid China in reaching them.

What Dr. Zhang might also have mentioned, but did not, is the North Korean state media’s studied ambivalence over China’s core interests in the current Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Whereas the DPRK has engaged in more or less an unending frontal assault on Japan over the history issue (and is thus in common cause if not absolute alignment with the ROK and China), over the territorial issue, the DPRK refuses to come to China’s aid in the international arena or among its own news-reading public.

Turning from Sino-North Korean relations and back to the despised Japanese Prime Minister, Southern Weekend piece goes on to cite “a Chinese reporter who has previously interviewed Abe Shinzo himself”:

When I met Abe, I asked him, “How many Japanese abductees do you think there are in North Korea now? Did the North Koreans tell you there were more than ten?” And he thought a bit, and then said “We estimate there are some tens (can’t be too many).” Evidently, Abe looks seriously at the talks with North Korea as a political means for himself:  If he is able to break through the Sino-Japanese and Japanese-ROK stalemate and relieve domestic political pressure on his Liberal Democratic Party, and at the same time solve the “abduction issue” with North Korea, it will result in more support and votes for him domestically.

Finally, the Southern Weekend analyzes why the talks are taking place in Beijing, tendering the hypothesis that this is being done in part so that the warming trend between Tokyo and Pyongyang can further aggravate China, as previous DPRK-Japan meetings had been organized by Embassies in Mongolia and Vietnam.

Strangely, no mention is made of the importance of Japanese and North Korean diplomatic outposts in Shenyang, the buckle of the urban “rust belt” of the Chinese northeast, in facilitating the latest round of DPRK-Japan interactions. That is a bit of a loss: The North Korean hotel in Shenyang is rather empty these days, but Japanese tourists, officials, and companies can fill pockets of all kinds in the Chinese northeast. In the meantime, “the Shenyang channel” seems primed to remain viable but quiet, at least insofar as the Chinese media is concerned.

Source: Su Jiapeng, “苏嘉鹏], “朝鲜日本应对困局抱团取暖?” [Are North Korea and Japan Having to Gang Up and Warm Up in the Face of Mutual Isolation? ],” Nanfang Zhoumo [Southern Weekend], April 3, 2013, p. B11. Extracts translated by Adam Cathcart.

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