Communist allies North Korea and China proclaimed their unity on Thursday as the North’s leader Kim Jong-Il held his first meeting with a senior Chinese envoy since the region’s worst crisis in years erupted.
China’s most senior foreign policymaker Dai Bingguo visited Pyongyang as pressure intensifies on Beijing to rein in its neighbour, after North Korea’s deadly shelling of a South Korean island inflamed tensions on the peninsula.
The top United States (US) military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, accused China of aiding and abetting the hardline Kim regime’s “reckless behaviour”. But the old wartime allies are firmly together, dispatches from their official media said.
“The two sides reached consensus on bilateral relations and the situation on the Korean peninsula after candid and in-depth talks,” read a brief report from China’s Xinhua news agency, datelined Pyongyang, after Kim and Dai met.
North Korea’s official news agency said the delegations discussed “issues of mutual concern” and efforts to improve friendly relations.
It marked the first time that Kim has met a senior foreign official since the North’s shock artillery attack on the South Korean island, and since his regime startled the world by showing off a sophisticated new nuclear programme.
China is the isolated North’s sole major ally and provides it with a crucial fuel and food lifeline.
US and allies stare China down
But Beijing has come under increasing pressure from the United States and US allies to rein in North Korea following the incident, which was the first shelling of civilian areas in South Korea since the 1950-53 war.
It has so far refused even to condemn the North for the November 23 artillery attack, which killed four people including two civilians.
In Tokyo on Thursday, Mullen lashed out at China as he touted a united defence front with South Korea and Japan against North Korea.
“Northeast Asia is today more volatile than it has been in much of the last 50 years,” the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs said.
“Much of that volatility is owed to the reckless behaviour of the North Korean regime, enabled by their friends in China,” Mullen said.
He also said he felt a “real sense of urgency” about building up three-way defence ties with Seoul and Tokyo. US forces have separately held major military drills with the two allies since North Korea’s attack.
‘Unfair interpretation’
The admiral has proposed three-way drills and said in Tokyo that any threat is “much better addressed with all of us together, in terms of showing strength and getting to a point where we can deter North Korean behaviour”.
China’s ambassador to Tokyo, Cheng Yonghua, reportedly rejected the US-led demands for his government to pressure North Korea and said it was an “unfair interpretation” that Beijing holds much sway over the Kim regime.
“It is unreasonable,” he told the Asahi daily. “They should not simply dictate that ‘China should do it’, without sitting at the table of dialogue.”
The current flare-up has confronted Beijing with a wider diplomatic challenge, wrote Zhu Feng, deputy director of the Centre for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.
“Perceptions that China ‘protects’ North Korea could lead to the emergence of a powerful Washington-Tokyo-Seoul axis directed not only against North Korea but also implicitly at China,” he said.
The US, meanwhile, opened up an unofficial channel of communication, with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a veteran North Korea troubleshooter, announcing a private visit to the North from December 16 to Decmeber 20.
US state department spokesperson Philip Crowley said he was aware of Richardson’s planned visit but said it was a private trip and that “he will not be carrying any particular message” from the US government.
In other diplomacy, Japan’s pointman for the North Korean nuclear issue Akitaka Saiki headed for talks in Moscow with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin.
North Korea on Thursday defended its artillery attack on the border island, saying the South’s “puppet warmongers” had provoked the incident with its own naval drills.
South Korea’s capital, Seoul, is within artillery range of North Korea. It announced plans to supply additional gas masks to residents of its border islands in case of a chemical attack by the North. — Reuters