CHINESE INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS: TYING CHINA MORE TIGHTLY TO NORTH KOREA…OR TO KOREA?

6/8/13

Yesterday’s (i.e., Friday 6/8/13’s, page A8) Wall Street Journal featured an article by Jeremy Page entitled “China Builds Up Its Links to North Korea.”  The article discussed Chinese construction of an extensive infrastructure network, including roads, railroads, an immense power cable, and a high speed railroad line, linking northeastern China with North Korea.  The article reports that the infrastructure program indicates a continuing desire of China to not only sustain North Korea but also to integrate North Korea even more deeply into the Chinese economy.   This massive undertaking contradicts China’s stated claims that it is cooperating with the  U.S. strategy of isolating and pressuring North Korea.   Such activity indicates, according to the article, that China not only believes that the Kim dynasty will remain in power in Korea but also that it is taking steps to insure North Korea’s vitality, or at least continued existence, as a buffer against what it considers U.S. encroachment in northeast Asia.

A thought occurred to yours truly as I read this piece, however…

Could the Chinese be taking these steps to integrate not the NORTH Korean economy with that of China but, rather, to integrate the KOREAN economy with that of China?  Perhaps the Chinese, being long range thinkers and having a firmer grasp on reality than most of the people who inhabit our government, are giving up Kim Jong Eun and the entire concept of Communist North Korea for dead and are anticipating a reunification of the peninsula with Seoul, rather than Pyongyang, in charge.   The Chinese are tying their economy into that of North Korea with hopes of being firmly wrapped up with the new Korean government.

Remember German unification.  After a very troubling decade, roughly coinciding with the calendar ‘90s, the Germans eventually integrated the former East Germany into the larger German economy, resulting in the second German economic miracle.   A reunification of the Korean peninsula would be at least equally troublesome at its start, but, eventually, one has to bet that the very resourceful, and very rich, South Koreans would integrate the former north into a vibrant Korea, creating a kind of Asian Deutschland, an economic juggernaut that, while not quite on par with Germany, would be a formidable force on the regional and world economic stages.   The Chinese would do well to be closely tied to the new Korea, just as countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary have done well being closely tied to Germany.

Further, the Chinese always think politically as well as economically.   It would certainly be in China’s interest to be firmly tied to a unified Korea in order to counterbalance the influence the United States would have on the new power on the peninsula.

Anybody who thinks about the Korean situation at all carefully cannot believe that the North is sustainable.  North Korea in its present form is finished; its fall is assured and the only question is time.  And the Chinese have shown a remarkable ability to think in terms of longer periods of time than does the West.