Angry Planet - Why China won’t stop North Korea

Episode Date: August 10, 2017

As tensions grow between the U.S. and North Korea, onlookers have increasingly called on China to intervene. Which makes sense. Beijing is Pyongyang’s biggest trade partner and the two countries have a relationship that stretches back to World War II. But just because China is North Korea’s closest ally doesn’t mean China has control. According to Chinese history expert Adam Cathcart, China’s relationship with the DPRK is complicated. Cathcart lectures about China and Chinese history at Leeds University in Britain and he’s spent some time along China’s border with North Korea. This week on War College, he explains the relationship between the two countries, what the border looks like and what happens Chinese border guards interrogate you. By Matthew Gault Produced by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. What do you do in the absence of data? You try to get as much as you can. You go to the places you talk to as many people as possible.

You read the press, but you also have to look at the same. back at what happened the last time North Korea collapsed because I think there's a playbook there. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. Of all the threats to the global world order, North Korea is perhaps the most dangerous. The regime's nuclear ambitions unchecked by sanctions and sunshine policies seem dangerously close to fruition. As the DPRK grows over closer to become a nuclear power, many in the world have looked to China to curb the ambitions of its neighbor. Here to help us sort through all of this is Chinese history expert, Adam Cathcart.

Adam Cathcart is a historian and lecturer at the University of Leeds in England and has spent the past few months researching North Korea's special relationship with China. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Okay, so my first question is, why do people want China to handle the North Korean situation? Well, China's always had a lot of influence on the Korean Peninsula historically, but I think most of the requests and the pressure that we see on China from Washington, D.C., and other places like Japan and even South Korea, is more rooted in an understanding that China's grown in power in the last 20 or 30 years in particular, and that the trade balances and other things since the fall of the Soviet Union have really fallen in their favor with North Korea since that time. It's both sort of imagined, I suppose, imagine Chinese influence, but it's also rooted in a sense of the history that goes back not just to ancient China, but to the Cold War, when North Korea sort of both played off and used as patrons, the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. Well, what's the relationship between China and North Korea now, right? China is North Korea's only trade partner, is that correct? Well, they're the primary trade partner. I mean, North Korea trades and has delegations going out.

all over the world in various places, various continents even. I mean, you've got this Mansoudai art studio, you know, selling statues and other things and their services and their designing services in places even as far as Africa and Southeast Asia. But their primary trading partner, yeah, is China. And, of course, they have a major trade deficit with the Chinese. I think they take in about five times more than they export, even when they're exporting quite a lot of minerals. So their trade relationship is very important, but the political relationship, I think, is the one that is least understood. And then second to that is the security relationship.

And on the political side, you have a party-to-party relationship that dates back to actually the 1930s. Before the Korean Workers Party was even founded, they were members of the Chinese Communist Party. Kim Il-Sung, the founder of North Korea, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party. He spoke Chinese. He fought in Northeast China against the Japanese, et cetera. And that party-to-party relationship has really been maintained through all the difficulties of the Cold War and even up to the present, to the extent that the Chinese Communist Party basically helped to guarantee the transition from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un. They more or less told the rest of the world back off and told the North Koreans, that's fine. We support Kim Jong-un if that's what you need to do to maybe transition towards a more open system.

As far as the security side, the military-to-military relationship is still fairly poorly understood, and we're not sure really how much the two militaries are talking to one another. But I think that's somewhat less adversarial than is sometimes depicted in more recent terms. So it's a fraught but a long history. And so I think that there's kind of an understanding on the Chinese side, at least, and probably on the North Korean side, that times are never going to be perfect, but you can more or less count on this party for certain things. Because we look, I feel like we in the West look at that relationship and think you've got this kind of chaotic world actor on your border.

Why don't you do something about it? Why does China give them the amount of carte blanche that they seem to? Or are we completely reading the relationship wrong? Well, it depends how you're reading Chinese foreign policy, right? I mean, is China a revolutionary power, that is to say, are they drawing on that legacy, the revolutionary legacy where they, They're drawn to North Korea for ideological reasons. And, you know, this is a Leninist party state. This is a country that has a lot of affinity.

They do a lot of things that Xi Jinping would like to see, right? The youth organizations are very strong. The kids are patriotic. They're kind of anti-American, they're very nationalistic. They don't even have Internet access, of course, famously. And those are the kind of things that Xi Jinping sort of looks at China and says, hey, you know, we could, we don't mind that sort of thing. So on the political side and on the cultural side, North Korea's got a few chips, right?

They also support China at the UN in areas that are less popular, right? Like not just the Taiwan issue, but Tibet and Xinjiang and, you know, North Korea is not a powerful country internationally, but they do more for the Chinese Communist Party than I think it sometimes is acknowledged. And, of course, the main thing is structural, right? Going back to the Korean War, this alignment between the U.S. and South Korea. And I think there's a sense that they don't want to destabilize the Korean Peninsula because the Americans are so close. And it's not just the Americans, and it's not just the South Koreans itself for the Japanese who are aligned with the United States. And the Chinese Communist Party has been very clear and continuously clear since the late 1940s, even before they got into power in Beijing, that they really fear as sort of a Japanese revival under American auspices.

And the North Koreans are aligned with them absolutely on that front. All right. So let's change tracks just a little bit. I don't want to ask if we have any idea how close North Korea is to having a nuclear weapon. Well, they've been super obvious in their own testing. And they, in fact, at the UN, they sent a letter to the UN. I think it was in early June or, I'm sorry, early July, not long after their most recent to this Hwasong 14 missile test, the ICBM. And they basically pat themselves in the back and asked the international community for credit for being so transparent, right?

that sort of we have, we're showing you everything. We just want to be clear that we're making big progress here, but nothing secret. We're moving towards a nuclear deterrent, an intercontinental nuclear deterrent and miniaturization of the warheads and things like that, because it'll stabilize the region and it will finally give us parity with the United States.

What that doesn't answer, of course, is this obvious question, which you can't ask in North Korea. Wait a minute. Did you not have a deterrent before? The Americans haven't invaded your country. A lot of water has gone under the bridge. A lot of things have happened in the 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, et cetera. But they have basically put themselves mentally and propagandistically in this space

where they've got to move as quickly as possible towards a nuclear deterrent. The one thing I would add, Matthew, is that it's not just that it's on the horizon and they continue to give themselves credit and Kim Jong-moon credit, right, that he's the genius driving this program. They've even said he's helped to design things like rocket boosters. and it's a little bit over the top. But this is a legacy program of Kim Jong-il. There was a big Moran Bung Band concert,

which is this girl band in North Korea that's very, I've managed to publish a couple of academic papers about, and trying to take them quite seriously from a policy standpoint. And this band actually provides a lot of signals. The new history of the North Korean Missile Program is being told through images shown as a backdrop to this girl band's rock concerts. So you've got all these missile scientists and people like Jeffrey Lewis, these well-known arms control won, people who have sort of a following online, you know, grabbing all this stuff online, screen grabs and saying, wow, we've got to revise what we know about the North Korean nuclear program.

Look at Kim Jong-il. Here's Kim Jong-il with Kim Jong-un having a look at a nuclear weapon, I'm sorry, at a missile which could carry potentially a nuclear warhead in 2010 or whatever. So they're revising their history of that based on these kind of images. So what we know is continually growing, and the North Koreans are actually being sort of helpful in their own sort of tactical ways in explaining that, you know, they're getting closer and closer. So I don't think this is a straw man by any means. Their capacity is obviously making big steps forward. And the number of tests is getting more and more compressed. So they've been saving a lot of money, making a lot of money.

I'm not sure how they're paying for it or if they can keep up this pace, but they're definitely making big strides. Right. it seems as if at some point in the near future the world is going to have to reckon with a North Korea that has a viable nuclear weapon, right? And they're going to let everyone know because you don't keep a nuclear weapon secret. Well, precisely. I mean, the whole point is that everybody's going to know. I think that what they're looking for is probably something along the lines of, if you go back to sort of India and Pakistan, these sort of rival nuclear tests, and back in, I think it was

99, 2000, I think they're hoping for something sort of like that where there's sort of a wave of a program, probably tighter sanctions, et cetera, et cetera, but eventually the world and the region is going to have to have to live with it. So I think that's sort of what they're going for. The question about what is the Chinese attitude, is there a really strong anti-nuclear position that the Chinese take where they say, hey, wait a minute, now you've gone too far, right? Now you've gone too far. And now we're going to cut off whatever it is, oil. We're going to send back guest workers. We're not going to allow so many North Koreans legally into China to make this money.

We're going to shut you guys down in various ways. We're going to clog up the sea lanes and start treating the North Korean Navy like it's the Japanese Navy or the Americans in the South China Sea, etc. So there's more that the Chinese can certainly do, or is what they're doing now sort of just, you know, are they more or less playing verbal games? This is just propaganda to make the rest of the world think that China is. You know, they say they're anti-nuclear, that they don't like North Korea having them. his capability, but in fact, they're going to let it happen for tactical reasons or because they feel they have no other choice.

Well, we can look at what they're doing along the border, right? Yeah, that's one means. I mean, I've done a, I'm in the middle of a study now. It should be published next month with the Jamestown, China Brief, and the Wall Street Journal just published a big piece, which I assume some people have seen. Jeremy Page did some great reporting, not just along the border, but just kind of reading Chinese military websites, talking to a few officials, actually. you know, seeing what's going on working papers in various journals,

and the PLA, this Guifeng Sherbao, which is just the National Defense Daily, which you don't hear that much about in terms of people talk more about the Global Times and getting Chinese signals, but the National Defense Daily publishes quite a lot of interesting stuff. And I think that what my reading of the evidence and my own travels along the border, where I meet, you know, I've met some border guards. I had a little run-in with some guys in April and got to know some of them better than I had intended to, but, you know, that's just one little micro data point in a broader reading of multiple data points and sifting through a lot of misinformation because there's a lot of rumors that are

floated and you have to track them down and half the time they're coming from a Japanese newspaper or, you know, some guy in an office in Hong Kong. But I think that in terms of getting to your question, can China exert leverage along the border? They're certainly building a capacity. And that capacity can be used for a lot of things, right? There's an infrastructural capacity which can be used for trade and is used for trade. You know, customs.

houses, but they're also building up border defense, which they're doing in a lot of places, right? More cameras, possibly using unmanned aerial drones. They've been, lately, they've been rescuing more North Koreans during floods in September 2016. There was a big flood just, I think it was about 10 days after their last nuclear test. And they, sorry, about two or three weeks after the nuclear test in the extreme northeast. And the Chinese rescued a few North Koreans and sort of brought them over to China for medical treatment, just, you know, five or six people and then brought them back. But this was reported on this last week. There were floods again on the North Korean-Chinese border. And I think

something like 20 North Koreans were, the North Koreans actually called the Chinese border guards. So there's communications there. And they said, hey, we can't rescue these people. We don't have the capacity. So they were brought over to the Chinese side and brought back. So, you know, there's some cooperation happening on that border. There's security cooperation in the sense of public security bureaus, right, like watching South Korean Christians, probably watching some foreigners. There's a guy, Kenneth Bay, an American, who was detained by the North Koreans for over a year. And I think the Chinese and North Koreans definitely coordinate on those kind of cases.

Otto Varmier, I think, is a slightly different case. I doubt there was any coordination there because Varnbier wasn't a missionary along the North Korean border. But I think that at the end of the day, there are assumptions about what China is doing along the border, we have to need to be examined, you know, namely, is the North Korean military being informed about what the Chinese military is doing? If it's a military drill, is China sending signals through its media, and it's being really clear about what it's doing along the border? If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then the North Koreans probably have

somewhat less reason to be nervous. What I would be worried about if I were in the North Korean shoes is these little signals from hardliners in the PLA, like Wang Hai Yun, a former general in Nanjing, who publishes a lot, who's kind of a vocal hawk on these issues, where they talk about potentially having to go into North Korea to do exactly the things that Americans were talking about in 2016 in Syria, right, set up a safe zone or basically create a buffer between its own territory and North Korean refugees and people trying to get out of North Korea. So in other words, if you're dealing with a massive humanitarian problem, that those North Koreans are not going to flow into Chinese territory

the way they did during the Korean War in numbers of like 10,000 here, 10,000 there. We're not talking about millions. Finally, in the recent kind of discussion about this, there was some misinformation that was put out that China was getting ready for a massive North Korean influx. And there's a guy named Liu Chow

who's another kind of gray beard in Shenyang near the border. He's a rarely conservative guy, not a military man, but a top think tank official. And he's very much a party aligned. this guy's got, you know, when no one else is able to quote, he's able to quote, and he does talk to a handful of foreigners, although I did have a journalistic friend who told him that when he called him, I think, in 2011, the guy hung up the phone on him and said, I don't talk to CIA spies. So he's a rough and tough guy, but Liu Chow said,

there's about, our estimates are about a million, that there might be a million North Korean refugees in the case of a North Korean collapse. So I think China's got enough, we could talk more about this, if you like, capacity in other areas and enough practice, more or less, to stop a , to staunch a North Korean refugee inflow. But that whole notion of the meaning of the border then, and would Chinese troops be doing this within sort of North Hamgyong province or North Pyongan province or, you know, Kangye, where's the line?

That's a whole other question, I think. And we will get to that, but first we are going to take a break. You're listening to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. We're on with Adam Cathcart, and we were talking about the relationship between North Korea and China. Thank you for listening to War College. We are back with Adam Cathcart. I'm your host, Matthew Galt,

and we are talking about the relationship between China and North Korea. So before the break, we were talking about the border. And one thing you said in there that caught my attention, and I have to ask a follow-up question on, is that you said you got to know some of the border guards a little bit better than you wished.

What's the story there? Well, I think it's a story of what China was doing in April 2017, and a lot was happening at that time. There were a lot of rumors. There was an NBC news report, which basically said that people, American reporters had talked to some officials in the DOD or the Trump administration that said a preemptive strike was coming on North Korea if North Korea was going to test another missile or nuclear weapon around that time, because there was a thought that April 15th, which is the birthday of Kim Il-sung, you know, he's. He's now 105 and nicely dead. I've seen his body in Pyongyang, nicely embalmed, I should say. So there was a thought that this was going to be the day where they did another major provocation or a major test.

And so there was a lot of Mike Pence was on his way to the region. He was going to come soon. Trump said that there was going to be the U.S. Carl Vinson was on the way in Armada, as you think he put it. So tensions were quite high. And, of course, the military drills were ongoing between the U.S. and South Korea on the other side, which always puts North Korea into kind of a frame of these aren't just drills, right? You're getting ready to strike. Now, you could argue that a lot of that is meant for

domestic consumption on the North Korean side, but there you have it. Of course, tourists and Pyongyang didn't feel anything. There's not a sense of urgency. People were mainly getting ready for this parade that happened on April 15th. So in any event, there were a handful of foreign reporters floating around the area that month, and I talked to several of them. And basically, not a one of them got anywhere near the border without being first sort of intercepted by Chinese usually plainclothes public security bureaus but other times uniformed soldiers. And those, it's just pointillistic. This isn't, you can't say that there are 150,000 Chinese troops along the border as I think

the Sankei Shimbun reported on April 9th. So I was up there four days later in Tumen. And yeah, I've taken some photos of the North, of the North Korean side because there was amazing. A flood, the river moved, the two men river. It's quite shallow anyway, but it, this is that there was a huge flood up there last year, and I hadn't been there since September, and of the previous year before the flood happened. And literally the border moves. So I was taking some photos of that, and, you know, what happens on the other side?

You know, fewer North Koreans than normal. This land, these sort of deltas within the river weren't being farmed anymore because they've been totally turned into rocks from just the power of the river, from the power of the floods. And anyway, the process of taking those photos, I was, yeah, picked up by some North Korean border, sorry, by some Chinese border guards, who then managed to examine all the contents of my laptop, my cell phone. I had one image of North Korean border guards that had been published that I had taken a screen grab of or something from the Chinese website, you know, six months ago. And that was a problem. But, yeah, they were all very, very friendly. They eventually escorted me. The two plainclothes guys escorted me out of town.

I was with a Korean-speaking colleague, Stephen Denny, who's a Koreanist, and writes about the ethnic Koreans as well, Korean nationalism. So through our combined Chinese and Korean language capability, we managed to have some interesting conversations with the plane closed guys. The Border Police themselves were quite friendly, cordial, but we went through six layers of the bureaucracy, basically, in the space of an hour where, you know, tell me your story, okay, now my boss is going to come, tell him your story, what are you doing here? look at all your documents and stuff. So the point is, I suppose, that tensions were high, but also that they were quite carefully watching the border. People can read my stuff is coming out about that, probably in the next month,

and I had a piece about it in the South China Morning Post, about a week after it happened, I suppose. But the one other thing I would just mention, though, is that I was not charged with espionage, nor was I labeled as a journalist. But the journalists are very, very closely watched, and China's put together this whole new public security campaign. In fact, it launched right around that time, April 15th,

where we're supposed to be mindful of foreign spies all the time if we're Chinese. So it's the research environment's getting more and more difficult, I think, I would say, in China. Well, it sounds like they are, they're prepared for whatever's going to happen, right? They're preparing for the worst along that border region. Oh, absolutely. And I think that I haven't traveled to the Myanmar-China frontier, but I do some work in this field that is called borderland studies. And there's a lot of theory that people are throwing around.

Do the people that live in the region, are they called borderlanders, and is hybridity happening, and are people evading the state? Or what is the meaning of sovereignty? And it's like this fetishization of the border almost. And you get really excited talking about the biopolitics and passports and, you know, getting around local police and the meaning of being a local on one side of the river. And that's all exciting. but it's not so useful in terms of trying to understand what is, you know, what is, what's really

happening along the frontier, but it is useful for talking to other people working on other borders. So I think that China's border with Myanmar is one where we could probably do more comparative work because there is a major refugee problem, is Rohingya areas or whatever on the, on the Myanmar side. And that's one of the things that I've seen is that the Chinese military press, they don't make those explicit comparisons. But if you read about how they talk about military drills on the Myanmar side of the border,

it's exactly what they're doing with the North Koreans. They're saying we're transparent. We're telling the other side what's going on. But we're going to do artillery drills. We're going to get ready for biological warfare. We have to deal with refugee blocking. And it has an intimidating function. And they use that language.

So it's transparent, yet it's intimidated. So I don't doubt very much that it's not just to tell the Americans, hey, we're ready for whatever. because then they're not really telling the Americans all the ins and outs of their plan, of course, for a North Korean collapse. But there's also a signaling function to the North Koreans, even if they're talking to them, which they say they are, that those activities play. And there's a domestic element as well to tell the people in the region in Giling, province, Shenyang, the owning, whatever, that, hey, we're ready for anything. That's a traditional function of a state, after all. Do we have any sense of what they think that ending will look like? Are they expecting America to do to come in and invade along with South Korea?

Or do we have any idea what they think is going to happen? The thing that I've seen lately in some writing by Chinese academics is this idea that we can actually talk about a post-Kim family, North Korea, but it is going to remain the DPRK that we, the Chinese, any security community, I guess I would say. We don't want to, we don't necessarily agree preemptively to South Korean unification, a South Korean lead unification of the peninsula for all the reasons that are normally, you know, and these haven't changed much since, since, you know, books were published in the 1960s about, you know, China Crossing the Yalu and why they, why they would choose to intervene in the Korean War in the first place, right? So going back to kind of the root of Maoist security practices and the outlook on the Korean Peninsula, a lot of that

has not changed. So Xi Jinping, I think, is somewhat of a traditionalist in this regard. I think they would like to see a North Korean state more friendly to China. They have these three nose, I think, that they use, which sometimes change. But one of those is that there should not be the development of an antagonistic regime in North Korea. So North Korea is called belligerent now globally, but the Chinese haven't really labeled it as much, right, even though they sometimes will get a lot of abuse in Chinese media, the North Koreans. But as long as, as long as it's a friendly regime, the Kim family can do whatever they want, I think.

Or the North, the Chinese can deal with a North Korea that is not led by the Kim family. Now they're talking about all that now, but what's lost is the hypocrisy, really, that, look, you know, Wen Xiaobao, Hu Jintao, you know, and Xi Jinping was part of the Politburo in this time when this was all happening, and he was already the anointed successor. You know, you made your bed, right? and you made your bet about supporting the Kim family. So that's the weird thing about the Chinese Communist Party.

They will complain, and they complain in the 80s. They complain in the 50s about the Kim family's centrality to North Korean politics and how odd it was, how sort of aberrant it was. But they've supported it when it needed critical support every time. All right. Do we have any sense of how the New South Korean government is looking at all of this? Because I know it was a very, it was a strange election. The previous administration was marred by scandal.

how are they viewing all of this? We don't hear a lot about them right now. Well, my information on this is slightly, is not as fresh as it ought to be, because I'm not in Seoul, and I haven't met the new foreign minister, I had some colleagues who did. My colleague, Stephen Denny, is a good source on this,

and kind of seeing what is the new approach from the foreign ministry, which has an experienced UN sort of refugee, actually oriented a foreign minister in place. But what I did see when I was in Seoul as a guest to the foreign ministry, and I met a vice foreign minister and talked with a basically at a conference with a lot of Chinese academics.

And what I learned from that kind of shoes, boots on the ground, I guess, experience, was that it's so much of South Korea's relationship with China now has been distorted and framed through the THAAD issue, this theater, you know, high altitude anti-missile defense, which was put in place. And I think that's where we're seeing some flex, where the Moon administration is basically, I think they feel maybe they've been saddled in a sense with this anti-missile defense system

that's been set up on a golf course, and the Chinese have been pressing hard on this. And it's not just sort of backroom conversations. It's been a full-blown online nationalism. All the stuff we've been reading for the last 10 years about sort of the mass nationalism, party-directed, centralized, you know, very highly coordinated online campaigns,

shutting down soft power initiatives, and constricting, for example, you know, Chinese tourism to South Korea. And latte, I was at a latte, South Korea department store in China in April, and it was basically empty, gigantic place. Now, that's my little anecdotal point, right, anecdot. But on the structural side,

if you read the Chinese press, I mean, the fat issue still isn't gone. and I think they're trying to get as much as they can. Colleagues like Bruce Klinger and others in Washington, who are more security-oriented, Dan Pinkston and Seoul is another name for people to follow, but we'll tell you that, you know, that Fad is defensive.

The Chinese are basically totally overplaying their hand and overreacting to this anti-missile defense, but because it's supposed to cover North Korea, but in fact they feel it's aimed at China. So South Korea is right in the middle of all of that. And there's a lot of rhetoric in South Korea about we're a middle power, right? There's these big soft power initiatives.

And the fat issue just manages to crash right into all of that and say, wow, South Korea actually doesn't have that much influence with China. They're beholden to American security interests, and there hasn't been a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. South Korean Security Alliance. And if anything, I think the transition from the Park administration to the New Moon administration indicated that Moon was going to have to be tougher on North Korea than he had appeared to want to be in the campaign. And then the North Korean actions, that always happens, right?

South Koreans come in often talking about, you know, we're open to whatever, trust, politic, you name it. And the North Koreans just say, that's fine, but we've got a timetable for missile tests, nuclear tests or whatever. And they don't plan to stop those. Well, it feels like all of this is coming to a head and everyone is preparing for it to come to a head. Let me ask you, as the expert, do you think in our lifetime we're going to see the end of the dynasty or the DPRK? It's hard to know because there are so many open questions. Our data is still quite flawed.

But if you look at what defectors are saying, there's a handful of new defectors coming out in North Korea. I managed to meet one before he defected, Tay Yongho, who was in London, I met him a couple times. He never revealed to me that he was planning to leave, of course. But he's come out as a very hard line, basically saying he thinks the regime is kind of on the ropes, but they're not going to give up their nuclear weapons. And there's a new guy who's now based in Virginia, who's been talking a fair amount,

surname to R.I., talking to Anna Fyfield at the Washington Post and some other people. And these guys, you would argue, are pretty well disposed. These aren't people who have been, you know, who are in a gulag or just, you know, on the periphery. Hjonso Lee is another one who had left North Korea, you know, quite a while ago. and living in China being in the periphery, not on the center of power. But these are people in important ministries who are basically saying, so these are important voices from within North Korea, basically,

and the North Korean bureaucracy in the Workers Party, saying there's a lot of doubts about how North Korea is being run. There may be a chance to sort of break down the Workers' Party rule. On the other hand, structurally, I think, I mean, defective voices are interesting. They're important. We should be listening. On the other hand, if you look at the structures, there's no U.S.-China alignment.

I don't know that the United States how much you could give up to China to get China to actually talk at a more systemic level about what the future would be. I mean, even basic stuff like deconfliction in the case of a North Korean collapse seems not even on the table.

I think that the Chinese Communist Party is very clearly supporting the existence of the DPRK and I think they're going to continue to. I mean, the sanctions issue is a really big one. Are the sanctions going to bite? so hard that the North Koreans would be choked off. And it appears that they certainly are not now, and the Chinese aren't willing to go so far. I mean, there's a bank that was recently sanctioned, and the sanctions advocates in Washington

got very excited about this. And, of course, if you read the bank's website and dig around a little bit, you can see, oh, they just open a new branch on the Liaoning Peninsula. So, I mean, there's small signs that the government is going to let these businesses continue their work, if not their work with North Korea that's being punched. by Congress, for example, which is trying to punch hard at China, and increasingly with the Trump administration on just North Korea's finances. I mean, if you travel to Northeast China with an eye on North Korea, you can, you know, there's 50,000 North Korean workers in

North East, in China, many of them in the Northeast, you know, 300 here, a thousand here, et cetera. And they're not being sent back, you know, that money's coming in. So I think it's a, there's a number of things to look for for how the Kim regime is being sustained. China's had a power struggle recently. Sun Zheng Tai has been sort of displaced from the Politburo kind of. And so there's power struggles in China. This guy used to be the head of Jilin Province, so he had a lot of dealings with North Korea. So he's been displaced.

And there's power struggles in North Korea, which are obviously a lot more fraught, because we just know a lot less about what's going on. We know even less than what we know about China. So it's always a possibility. But the last thing I'd say in response to that question is, what do you do in the absence of data? You try to get as much as you can. You go to the places you talk to as many people as possible. You read the press, but you also have to look back at what happened the last time North Korea collapsed

because I think there's a playbook there that both China and the United States can have a look at. And there's a lot that can still be learned from going all the way back to the Korean War to try to figure out sort of what went wrong here. And how can we avoid some of these missteps that almost led to a nuclear war? between the United States and China, nuclear attacks on China, I should say, since they didn't have nukes until 64. Well, what are some of the things that we can do? Well, I think one thing you can see is, you know, there's working papers now, but what's the,

in fact, you wrote a piece about this. What happens in the event of a North Korean collapse? Is there going to be kind of a local resistance that will rise up against the Workers' Party? What do you do with North Korean troops that are sort of floating around? And what I get disappointing when I read working papers on these things, which are coming out, Sice, Johns Hopkins is publishing this kind of stuff. Our hand corporation puts a lot of this stuff out with literally no reference to what happened in the Korean War. I mean, the lesson for me from the Korean War is this regime was only five years old. But when they finally broke after the Inchon landing, there was very little cohesion of the military, right?

These units were just floating around. There was a lot of surrendering. There was a lot of just movement. there wasn't much of a guerrilla resistance against the Americans and the South Koreans in that period. So now the question is, is the Workers Party indoctrinated locals to be much more fierce against the United States or against South Koreans coming? And I doubt it. So when I read working papers about sort of, is this going to be like the awakening in Iraq or whatever? Are there going to be anti-American guerrilla units that spring up and looking at where these arms are located?

and is there going to be guerrilla warfare in every single county against the United States? I think that's highly unlikely. It doesn't mean you don't have to plan for those kind of things. But I think that there's that. There's also, if you read like Jonathan Pollock is a really good voice on North Korean nuclear issues, who's written about history, kind of grapples with that. His view about the nuclear deterrent is that it's not meant to be launched. I mean, they're probable use of it in the case of a crisis.

It's not to launch or lava missile at Los Angeles or San Francisco, Seattle, whatever, Bremerton. but to instead they might just blow up some, you know, lines to Pyongyang, right, that they basically, or in the, on the sea on either side of the peninsula to basically say, don't come in here. We've got a crisis, but we want everybody out. And that's, in other words, a nuclear explosion that is not directed, you know, at an American military base in Japan or something else. And the Nautilus Institute, Roger Kovazos and others have written a little bit about this as well. So those are the kind of things to look for that we wouldn't. expect that. That obviously didn't happen during the Korean War, but there's this kind of discussion of, but they're looking at the history, they're worried about a land invasion from both

the South and the North, I think, their northern frontiers, and the nuclear deterrent might be one way for them to say, you know, this is one way to keep foreigners out. That's awfully dramatic, and that's rather apocalyptic, isn't it? But it's possible. As usual at the end of a war college, I'm a little bit more frightened and a little bit more depressed, but Adam Kathcart, thank you so much for joining us to talk about North Korea and China's relationship. My pleasure. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick.

Matthew Galt hosts the show and Wrangles the guests. It's produced by me, Bethelhabte.