While North Korea and China traditionally enjoy moderately cordial relations, not everything is harmonious between the two.
It’s little surprise that North Korea has only China to depend on. Once on the brink of destruction at the hands of UN and South Korean troops, the hereditary Stalinist dictatorship was rescued only through the timely intervention multi-million “People’s Volunteer Army” from Chairman Mao’s newly-established communist China.
The riddle is how China, half a century after the Korean War and decades after ultra-leftist ideology supposedly gave way to market capitalism, still deigns to support the aggressive, hyper-militarized North Korean regime.
The totalitarian state that more resembles George Orwell’s dystopian visions than a twenty-first century nation is an economic and humanitarian disaster, and it it poses a variety of headaches not just for its primary rivals in South Korea and the United States, but for its Chinese benefactor.
5. Nuclear Testing
Since 2006, the North Korean regime has conducted four nuclear bomb tests of progressively greater yield. The tests have infuriated the international community, particularly Japan and South Korea, which the North constantly demonizes in its official propaganda. In the latest test that was carried out in January, northern authorities claimed they had exploded a hydrogen bomb.
Though the regime’s claims of having built a working hydrogen bomb have been more or less proven to be empty talk, the fact that North Korea has continued to pour inordinate amounts of resources into upgrading its nuclear arsenal and delivery systems, concerns Beijing as well as Seoul and Tokyo. For China, which has for economic reasons mostly stopped engaging other nations on ideological terms, controlling its “little brother” becomes more difficult when they have teeth.
