Does China Have Plans to Colonize North Korea?
That is what the below article in the Daily Beast is speculating on. I have said this for a long time that if the Kim regime was to collapse the South Koreans are going to have immediately move to secure North Korea before the Chinese do. It should also be done without US troops. US troops moving north just legitimizes Chinese intervention into North Korea. Once the Chinese are in the ROK government may never get them out:
At the beginning of last week, Seoul launched a new round of China diplomacy to encourage Beijing to play a “constructive role” in denuclearizing North Korea. Optimally this marks a new era of cooperation between Seoul and Beijing, but it could also be part of a process leading to China’s colonization of the North.
The move follows President Park Geun-hye’s controversial trip to the Chinese capital in early September to participate in the military parade marking the 70thanniversary of the end of World War II. Washington, worried that South Korea was making itself a Chinese satellite, had tried to discourage her from attending the event.
Short of extraordinary measures, there is little the U.S. can do about Park’s increasingly visible tilt to China. Her mission is to seek the peaceful reunification of the two Koreas—her so-called Dresden Initiative announced in March of last year—and she has moved to enlist the Chinese by charming them into cooperation, seeking to engage them at every opportunity.
Park’s efforts to woo China look like they are paying off. Seoul, not Pyongyang, is Beijing’s friend these days on the Korean Peninsula. It is telling that Xi Jinping traveled to Seoul in July 2014, the first time a leader of the People’s Republic visited the South before going to the North. And in fact, he has yet to visit Pyongyang, the capital of his country’s only formal military ally, in his position as China’s president.
Despite all the smiles, the fear in Seoul is that China will frustrate Park’s vision of a unified Korean nation by sending its army south and either leaving behind a puppet regime or even colonizing North Korea. [The Daily Beast]
You can read the rest at the link.
This article is an interesting one and brings up quite a few possibilities for the future of the Korean peninsula. China is a definitely a wildcard in the Korean situation. With its growing industrial power it desperately needs the raw materials that North Korea is resplendent with. North Korea also offers a ready workforce that is already indoctrinated to a Stalinist lifestyle which China could easily exploit even with its now semi-Capitalist system. Also, as the article points out, the Chinese will be eager to get into North Korea and erase all evidence of their complicity in the North’s nuclear and missile programs. It will be interesting to watch what scenario plays out.
Another wildcard in play here is the upcoming change of leadership in the U.S. If the Democrats are successful in getting Hillary elected, we can probably expect a continuation of the Obama policies. However, if one of the hawkish, conservative Republican candidates currently on the docket gets to be President, I believe that we will see a more aggressive “pivot” to Asia by the U.S. and a sweeping change to the current status quo with relation to China and its current spate of militarism.