Cipher Brief expert Gordon Chang says the U.S. has leverage over China that it isn’t using to defuse the challenge from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Cipher Brief’s Brian Garrett-Glaser interviewed Chang as Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump trade threats of pressing a nuclear “button,” even amid potentially positive developments between North and South Korea. The interview, adapted for print below, also discussed China’s foreign policy writ large.
In a mostly bombastic New Year’s address, Kim threatened the U.S., saying he had a nuclear button on his desk and that the entire U.S. is “within the range of our nuclear strike.” But he also suggested he was open to negotiations with South Korea related to the 2018 Winter Olympics. Leaders in Seoul followed up by proposing talks commence soon.
President Donald Trump has sought to impose ever-greater sanctions on North Korea, and China has participated to some degree, saying they are focusing heavily on implementing United Nations sanctions. Analysts differ on how much leverage China has over North Korea, with some saying leaders in Beijing have “absolute” influence and others saying China wouldn’t risk destabilizing the peninsula. What’s your view?
The United States has overwhelming leverage over China, and China has overwhelming leverage over North Korea. I wouldn’t say it’s absolute leverage over Pyongyang, but certainly the Chinese can get the North Koreans to do what they want. You know, people talk about how 92 percent of North Korea’s trade in 2016 was accounted for by China—yes, that’s a lot. And, of course, China supplies diplomatic support to North Korea in the U.N. Security Council.
But the most important thing that Beijing supplies is confidence—to the North Korean regime that they are safe from South Korea, the United States, and the international community. If Beijing started to signal that it was no longer in support of the North Korean weapons program—or maybe no longer in support of Kim himself—I think regime figures would understand what they had to do. I’m not saying Beijing could ever get Kim Jong Un to change his mind about anything—that may be impossible, who knows. But they certainly can work on people around Kim, those who supply the support for the North Korean activities.
We’ve seen this. This dynamic has occurred since the time of Kim Il Sung, the North Korea regime founder. China would go out and buy a lot of North Korean generals, Kim would then purge them, and then China would go out and buy some more. This dynamic has continued to today, and I think the Chinese, through the people that they influence in Pyongyang, can get the North Koreans to do what Beijing wants. But only if Beijing really wants it.
What does the United States need to do, in your view, so that China will “really want” to do that?
I think we need to put the Chinese political system at risk, and President Trump can easily do that. So, for instance, on June 29, he designated a small Chinese bank—the Bank of Dandong—a primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the Patriot Act. That meant that Bank of Dandong could no longer transact business in dollars anywhere in the world.
That’s a small bank. Now, we also know that large Chinese institutions have been cleaning up cash for the North Koreans, such as Bank of China, one of China’s so-called “big four” banks. And we know that because a 2016 U.N. panel of experts report mentioned that Bank of China both devised and operated a money laundering scheme for Pyongyang in Singapore. There are indications that Bank of China has been doing this in other locations, and there are also indications that banks even bigger than Bank of China have been involved in this criminal activity.
If we take one of those big Chinese banks and impose what is essentially a death sentence on them, that rocks the Chinese financial system, and that probably pushes the Chinese economy—which is already fragile—over the edge. You do that, and the Chinese political system is not far behind.
So, if Trump got on the phone with Xi Jinping and said, “Look, I’m gonna do this,” I think Xi Jinping would quickly start to learn how to say “yes” to the United States. But no American president, including Trump, has been willing to do that. Of course, at no other time has North Korea threatened the U.S. like it does now. I don’t know what Trump will do, but we have the high cards. We can do this. You go through and you look at the economic relationship with China, it’s mostly in our favor. And so, I think that this is a question of political will. We just don’t have it.
Among some of the positive developments in recent days between North and South Korea, the two have re-established contact on a hotline that’s been dormant for almost two years. A lot of news reporting is calling this a “diplomatic breakthrough.” Do you think that’s an accurate characterization—and how does China view these developments?
This is not a breakthrough. This is just North Korea entering a new phase of its ongoing struggle against South Korea. Kim Jong Un is trying to drive a wedge between the United States and South Korea, as many people say. He’s also trying to drive a wedge in between the United States and Russia and China by making himself look like the reasonable one and the U.S. looking intransigent. The Chinese have always said—and the Russians as well—that the price for their buying into U.N. sanctions is the U.S. negotiating with the North Koreans. So, really what Kim is doing is he’s putting the U.S. to the test.
President Trump’s general approach to North Korea is the correct one, and that is trying to cut off the flow of money to the regime. Without money, this regime can’t launch missiles, can’t detonate nukes, can’t engage in other dangerous activities—matter of fact, without money, this regime probably falls apart. So, Trump’s approach is the right one. But he does need cooperation of other countries, and right now Kim is trying to get out from under sanctions.
In Kim’s New Year’s address, there were signals and actually some statements about how much the sanctions are affecting the regime. Now, we just started applying coercive pressure. There’s a lot more that we can do.
How do you see China’s approach to foreign policy overall right now?
China right now has this…overwhelming ambition. It’s really expansionist right now, and it’s willing to throw money at all sorts of places that really do not affect Chinese security. Paul Kennedy of Yale actually put it best: this is over-stretch. I think the Chinese are now overstretching themselves.
Be my guest—put money in Syria, put more money in Venezuela. I think that this is not very good for China right now. They’ve got a lot of problems at home, and that’s where they need to deploy their resources. Xi Jinping, though, thinks that China should be at center stage, as he said in his 3-hour-and-23-minute work report in October. Well, be my guest.
What else jumps out to you about China that perhaps isn’t discussed enough, or you think pundits often get wrong?
We sort of assume that China just wants to dominate the global system. And I think that that’s probably right. But what really concerns me is we’re starting to hear from Chinese media all sort of indications that they want to go back to this global tributary system, where there was only one legitimate ruler. This is ludicrous.
But Chinese leaders are actually bringing back the language associated with their concept of “all under heaven.” We heard this most notably when Foreign Minister Wang Yi, writing in Study Times, which is the [Communist] Party school’s newspaper, said that Xi Jinping’s “thought” on diplomacy—and a “thought” is a very important ideology—transcended 300 years of Western international relations theory. Well, if you subtract 300 years from 2018, you almost get to 1648, which is the Treaty of Westphalia, which established the notion of sovereign states. When you hear all this Chinese language of “one world, one dream,” and you put that together with what Wang Yi wrote, it really looks like China believes that it’s the only sovereign state.
Right now, Chinese ambition has just gone far too far. But that’s the way they are. As I mentioned, there’s this concept of over-stretch, and the Chinese are indulging their worst ambitions.
