The Historical Context of the Adversarial Relationship Between North Korea and China

Noted journalist Blaine Harden has a good piece published on the PBS Frontline website that explains why North Korea has such an adversarial relationship with China despite the Kim regime being dependent on their aid:

Kim Il-sung grew up in northeast China, where in the 1930s he became a guerrilla leader and fought alongside Chinese Communist partisans against Japanese occupiers. Without warning, local Communists turned on Kim and his men. Several hundred ethnic Koreans were tortured and murdered in a racist purge based on the party’s paranoid, and false, belief that they were secretly working with the Japanese.

Kim was arrested in China in 1934 and was lucky to survive. He later called the purge “a mad wind … [Koreans] were being slaughtered indiscriminately by [Chinese] with whom they had shared bread and board only yesterday.”

During the Korean War, his bitter memories were compounded by a painfully public loss of face. Kim Il-sung started the war in 1950 by invading South Korea with the backing of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But his army was soon obliterated by an American-led coalition and North Korea all but disappeared — until Chinese forces entered the fight and forced Kim to the sidelines of his own war. China’s top general, Peng Dehuai, chided Kim for his “extremely childish” leadership, telling him, “You are hoping to end this war based on luck.”

Kim Il-sung would never forget how he was treated. After the war, he made sure that China’s role in saving and rebuilding his state was largely erased from official histories. His resentment was compounded in 1980, when China publicly denounced as feudalism his decision to transfer absolute power to his son, Kim Jong Il, a succession that made North Korea the world’s only hereditary Communist kingdom.

Ill feelings between North Korea and China have often been mutual. Mao Zedong regarded Kim Il-sung as rash and doctrinaire — once describing him as “a number-one pain in the butt.” In 1992, China infuriated the Kim family by establishing diplomatic relations with South Korea, the archenemy of the North.  [PBS Frontline]

You can read more at the link, but just like his grandfather Kim Jong-un is being a “pain in the butt” to China.  However, he knows he can be adversarial because the Chinese will likely do nothing to remove the Kim regime because of the alternatives to the “pain in the butt” are worse.  That is why the Chinese will never completely abandon the regime until there is a better alternative offered.