Vox: China's North Korea problem is worse than ours

In short, the answer is yes. China's position on North Korea has been shifting, but that's been happening over the past couple of years; it's not just over the past six months. So we may have seen some acceleration of that, but it's a continuation of what we've been seeing for the past couple of years, where North Korea has increasingly become a strategic liability for China and debates within Beijing around the North Korea issue are hotly debated.

So there's been an ongoing evolution of policy within Beijing and they've been willing to put more pressure on North Korea. I think the degree to which the Trump administration has signaled that it's willing to exacerbate China's concerns in the absence of a solution has certainly gotten their attention. [...]

But at the same time, it's important to note that part of what North Korea has been doing over the past couple of years is trying to improve their capabilities. We often use the word "provocation" to describe North Korea's missile tests, and in a sense they are, but the regime is legitimately trying to improve its missile capabilities and not necessarily focused on defying China or the US or the international community. [...]

The problem is that they don't see a viable path to get there that doesn't create unacceptable risks of instability. So China may want North Korea not to have nuclear weapons, but at the same time there are a whole bunch of negative repercussions for China if it applies too much pressure. For instance, North Korea could turn on China and China could become a direct enemy of North Korea, so instead of North Korea threatening to shoot missiles at Guam it could be threatening to test them in a way that would endanger China.

There are also immediate concerns about Chinese pressure in conjunction with the international community precipitating a crisis of regime collapse in North Korea — and with it a massive flood of refugees crossing the border, loose nuclear materials, and the economic costs of instability on the peninsula. And then there are concerns about the ways in which a post-Kim, unified democratic Korea could become a strategic problem for China.

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