Silent Partners: Chinese Joint Ventures in North Korea - US-Korea ...

Silent Partners: Chinese Joint Ventures in North Korea Transcript 6
or don’t, so there’s a lot of reading on this, but basically we know that China wants to maintain
the status quo. That really translates into proping up the regime and ensuring its continued
survival. At the same time, China’s basically against unification, in practice and principle I think
they’d accept it, but it’s more of a case of what that future unified peninsula would look like.
We’ve had some small insights into that, we know that they might be satisfied with a peninsula
that’s not antagonistic and doesn’t have an alliance against them, but esentially maintaining the
survival of North Korea requires Chinese inputs. It requires aid, it requires trade, it requires
energy, food, and it requires investment in technology.
Now I’ve chosen to focus on joint ventures because I think they’re a very tangible manifestation
of Chinese commitment to North Korea. I think trade and aid are important but I also find them
much harder to track, and much harder to track with accuracy. In a way, joint ventures represent
the, essentially, Chinese investment in North Korea’s future. These are agreements and
commitments of capital between a Chinese entity and a North Korean entity that’s under the
state. Basically that means that they are committed very much to the continued survival of the
regime. The disillusion of the North Korean government on a practical matter would raise a lot
of the contracts in place into question. How do you have a joint venture when your partner,
which is part of the army, or the party, or the cabinet, they suddenly cease to exist. If their chain
of command dissolves then what does that mean for this joint venture and investment. And if
somehow the government is reconsituted, again, what does that mean for the state run
enterprises Are they still owned by the state, are they privatized, is it a mad scramble These are
all questions that I don’t get into in the report in too much detail but I think it might reflect a bit
on Chinese anxieties and really their expressed preference for the status quo.
We know that Chinese strategy towards North Korea is largely predicated on not only
maintaining its survival but getting it to moderate its policies and that’s where this Chinese
U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS | 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW, 6 th Floor | Washington, DC 20036
202.663.5830 | www.uskoreainstitute.org