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China Seeks to Engage North Korea
Despite U.S. hopes that China would pressure North Korea into giving up its nuclear program, Beijing seems to be looking past the six-party negotiations forum begun in 2003, the Christian Science Monitor reported today (see GSN, Feb. 28). “Any illusions in Washington that China will be complicit in helping to bring North Korea down should be set aside,” a diplomatic source said. Instead, China last year invested about $2 billion in North Korea and has supported infrastructure improvements in what one U.S. official has characterized as a “massive carrot-giving operation.” Beijing is not using the aid to garner nuclear concessions from Pyongyang, according to the Monitor. “China has decided to change its strategy on North Korea, and is looking beyond the six-party talks and the American approach,” said Alexandre Mansourov of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “They want to go their own way, and have decided to raise up North Korea again, to rebuild and reinvent it.” “For the first time [North Korean leader] Kim [Jong Il] has fully embraced Chinese [economic] reforms,” Mansourov added (Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor, March 1). North Korea, meanwhile, announced today that U.S. financial sanctions have not altered the course of Pyongyang’s nuclear development, Agence France-Presse reported. “We manufactured nuclear weapons with our own technology, funds and raw materials from A to Z,” said a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman. “As we are not dependent on the U.S. at all in the economic and financial fields, no U.S. sanctions would work on us.” The spokesman also repeated North Korean denials of U.S. claims that it was counterfeiting U.S. currency to finance its nuclear program (Agence France-Presse/ChannelNewsAsia, March 1).
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