How China and North Korea could reunite as comrades in war

The next war in East Asia will consume the region. It will not be confined just to Taiwan, argue Markus Garlauskas and Matthew Kroenig in a new article in Foreign Policy.

Increased Chinese and North Korean military activity this month suggests that both regimes are contemplating going into battle. For instance, two days before Foreign Policy posted the piece, Kim Jong Un delivered a speech announcing the deployment of “250 new-type tactical ballistic missile launchers” to positions near the Demilitarized Zone.  

Kim praised North Korea’s “munition industry workers” for developing the launchers “by their own efforts and technology.” However, Richard Fisher, a China military analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told me it is far more likely that the launchers are of Chinese origin and were built with Chinese parts and advice.  

In any event, the launchers can carry four tactical nuclear weapons each. As Kim boasted, they have “great military significance.” 

Garlauskas and Kroenig wrote that any conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan “would almost certainly become a region-wide war, engulfing the Korean Peninsula and pulling in both North Korea and South Korea.” The battle would give China “a strong incentive to strike U.S. bases in South Korea” and “urge North Korea to provoke and tie down U.S. forces there.”

They added that North Korea could fight beside China “to preempt a feared U.S. attack, take advantage of a distracted United States to settle old scores with its rival in Seoul or influence the outcome of a war that would have profound implications for its own security.” 

In late 1950, China sent “volunteers” to aid beleaguered North Korean forces in their fight against American, South Korean and other United Nations troops. Will the North now go to war alongside China? 

Traditionally, China has exercised great influence over North, largely because the Kim rulers needed Chinese aid and diplomatic protection, especially after the economic success of the North’s early years turned into decades of economic failure, beginning in the 1970s. 

Yes, the centuries-old antagonism between China and Korea remains, and the Kim regime often publicly disrespects Beijing. But the Chinese communists are patient overlords. The occasional North Korean defiance of China’s wishes is by no means significant. Chinese officials don’t expect obedience all the time, and they support their North Korean allies, whether or not they are compliant at any particular moment. 

When Jae Ho Chung was still a professor at Seoul National University, he told me that the Chinese know they have influence but prefer not to exercise it all the time. When China really wants something, it lowers the boom.

But does Beijing have enough leverage to coerce North Korea into fighting a war? The two states are parties to the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, which has a mutual defense clause. They were each other’s only military ally until June, when Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un inked a comprehensive agreement with a mutual defense provision.  

Fisher told me China has enough clout to force the North into launching “single diversionary strikes or coordinated joint attacks against South Korea, Japan or any number of American targets.” 

Not everyone agrees. 

“Kim will not act as China’s proxy or puppet,” David Maxwell of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Asia Pacific Strategy told me. “China will be unlikely to pressure or influence Kim to attack the South to support Chinese actions in Taiwan without substantial incentive, which for Kim can only be a guarantee that his actions will be successful.” 

China, of course, will not be able to provide such an assurance, especially if it is involved in conflict elsewhere. This means, as a practical matter, Kim must be able to get American troops off the Korean peninsula before he can join China’s side.

Maxwell, who served five tours of duty in Korea as a Special Forces officer, pointed out that the U.S., South Korea and the U.N. command can prevent Kim from aggressive actions by keeping their forces prepared for an attack. 

For more than half a century, three Kim rulers have successfully employed one tactic to avoid being dominated by far more powerful neighbors. “Dating back to the Korean War,” Maxwell told me, “the Kim family regime has effectively played Russia and China against each other, and it appears to be doing so today.” 

Kim Jong Un now has a problem, however. Both China and Russia, for the first time in decades, are closely coordinating actions. 

Last month, for instance, four Russian and Chinese nuclear-capable bombers — two Tu-95 Bears and two H-6Ks — intruded into the U.S. air-defense identification zone near Alaska. The Chinese and Russian navies and armies routinely exercise together as well. Moreover, China has been providing substantial support to Vladimir Putin’s faltering war against Ukraine. 

Kim, therefore, will have a difficult time playing off two “no-limits” partners that have decided to go to war together. And it will be difficult for the North Korean leader to keep Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin apart. The two leaders see the world in the same terms, identify the same enemy and conspire together.  

And both of them, despite severe problems, are getting arrogant. 

“Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” Xi told Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow in March 2023. “And we are driving this change together.” 

Kim Jong Un, in the world, as the Chinese and Russian leaders perceive it, is someone who serves their interests. 

Kim can always say no to Xi and Putin, but these days that may not be an answer the latter are prepared to accept. So, as Garlauskas and Kroenig argue, Washington has to prepare for a multitheater war in East Asia, as China and North Korea, plus friend Russia, join together as comrades in battle.  

Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and “China Is Going to War.”