Bof course, it would have been simpler to kill two birds with one stone: from Beijing, where he was in mid-May, Vladimir Putin could then have gone directly to Pyongyang, less than a two-hour flight from the Chinese capital . Ultimately, the Russian president preferred to wait a month before going to North Korea, where he will be on Tuesday June 18 and Wednesday June 19; after which he will fly to Vietnam.
China is certainly more comfortable with this compartmentalization of sequences which avoids the image of a triangle of convergences without nuances between three enemies of the West. Because Beijing has mixed feelings about the Russian-North Korean rapprochement that the invasion of Ukraine has brought about.
Double-edged evolution
The Russian president and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met out of mutual interest. The first needed North Korean shell stocks to continue its war; the second thus reduces its isolation and obtains food aid to stabilize the economic situation in its country after the difficult years of Covid as well as, perhaps, certain elements of knowledge in the ballistic or satellite fields. The North Korean dictator finds another benefit: he diversifies his contacts, while the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose obsession with autonomy is reflected in its doctrine “juche” (independence and self-sufficiency), has long worried about being too dependent on China.
This development is a double-edged sword for Beijing. It helps ease the burden of having to cover turbulent North Korea on the international stage and that of being able to deliver enough goods and food to ensure its survival. China considers that it is in its interest to maintain the buffer zone that is North Korea, because the major American bases in South Korea are only 400 kilometers from its territory. But the price for China was having to become the international umbrella for North Korea, despite its bravado, its nuclear tests and missile launches. Listening only to itself and not engaging, or not at all at the pace suggested by Beijing, the type of reforms that allowed China to develop, the North Korean regime was quite annoying its big neighbor.
The acceleration in the number of shots in the 2010s convinced a large part of Chinese strategic circles that North Korea, the only country with which China has a mutual defense agreement, had become a burden. The two countries renewed, in 2021, this treaty adopted after the Korean War (1950-1953) but, in 2017, an editorial in the official daily Global Times had taken care to specify that Beijing would only come to Pyongyang’s aid if it was attacked, not an aggressor.
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