Now, for news that doesn’t involve naked women…
Ampontan over at Japundit summarizes an rather interesting piece by the Shanghai Institute for International Studies’ Zhang Zuqian that seems to suggest North Korea might not be as important to China as some would believe. An interesting read, although I’m not quite sure if Zhang’s read of the situation is shared by policy makers in Beijing. Here’s a tidbit:
Zhang begins by claiming that China can no longer be criticized for being soft on North Korea after a Chinese envoy???s visit last month caused North Korea to back down from its suspension of participation in the six-party talks. While he notes that the message from President Hu Jintao was surely delivered in diplomatic language, it boiled down to this: North Korea????s nuclear activities compromise China????s vital interests, including security. Come back to the talks, or else.
He mentions the assertion by the South Korean ambassador to Beijing that if China were to block three of the limited number of roads linking it to North Korea using maintenance as a fig leaf, the situation would change for the better. In reply, the Chinese ambassador to Seoul publicly stated that economic measures could be used to exert pressure on the North.
Seoul asking Beijing to put the squeeze on Pyongyang? That’s not a very brotherly thing to do 
One Comment
I’ll have to hold my interest in the topic for about two decades, I figure, before we find out what China was and wasn’t doing during this period of North Korea problem making.
I have no particularly well based feeling that a lot of stuff is going on behind closed doors and in the field that we don’t hear about.
And when we hear about something like China moving large amounts of troops on the NK border, we just don’t seem to have enough informatoin to understand what the moves mean. Which is one reason I believe there is much going on we don’t get to see. Meaning, big troop movements are not isolated events. They are part of plans and strategies.
We probably won’t get a clear picture of what has been going on now until North Korea is no more and China is more forthcoming with scholarship on its activities.
I think we will be surprised at some of the stuff being said and done. I’m not sure what kind of a suprise it will be —- how China did pressure NK or China saved NK.
I do think I’d probably worry a little if I were SK. It depends on how much SK freely shows its mind to China in discussions on NK and/or how freely NK discusses the NK relationship with SK when it talks to China. In better words, I have a feeling there is much behind the scenes efforts between SK and NK that SK will not want to see become public knowledge in the future.