I often wonder what China's plan is regarding North Korea. Are they calling the shots or not? I'm just going to go ahead with assuming that they are in control of North Korea. Going back to the Korean War ( hopefully we don't have to start calling it the First Korean War), China has put both men and money behind North Korea to make sure that communist strongholds remain in the region. Yes the Korean War technically ended in a stalemate because no treaty was signed, and China was of course a big part of that (I'm just going to breeze over the Soviet Union's part in all of this btw). Some estimates say that China supplied at least 1.3 million troops, and comparing that to the U.S.'s 350,000 it shows that China was of course heavily emotionally invested in holding the line in Korea.
So fine, that was then and this is now. What about now?
China definitely supplies many things to North Korea, and although this doesn't publicly happen it seems obvious that China at least is somewhat more encouraging to North Korea behind closed doors than is shown. Maybe China is using North Korea to distract the world while they continue to feverishly build their economy outward and on top of the old communist contained China.
Maybe China just enjoys seeing North Korea harass the rest of southeast Asia and more particularly Japan. If you zoom out a little, before recently China was having a tough century or two. China was the clear leader of the region for quite some time and then Japan embarrassed them by invading China specifically and occupying the region in general. I definitely believe that China still has a long standing feud with Japan, and that they enjoy seeing North Korea distress and disrupt life for the Japanese.
Apart from this though, what's the end game here?
Once North Korea has a reliable nuclear arsenal they will force the rest of the world to negotiate with them. This is hopefully what happens instead of all of those newly completed bomb shelters coming in handy. Maybe all of this is just to have another point of control in the region which also gives China firm control over the South China Sea, though this is de facto already the case as China has no problem ignoring the decisions of the Hague or any other foreign jurisdiction. Personally I don't care if China controls the South China Sea and is tasked with anchoring most of the trading routes there. I only care that China is actively managing North Korea, and China has shown that they are capable of doing that, so there's hope after all and it definitely benefits China to be doing just that as well.
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