An Historical Perspective on the -North Border

By David C. Kang February 7, 2011

The past few years have seen increasing attention – mostly critical – of China’s relations with . In both South Korea and the U.S., policymakers, scholars, and other observers believe that China should do more to make North Korea behave more responsibly and are quite critical when China avoids pressuring or criticizing North Korean behavior. On the other hand, there is an underlying fear in South Korea that China intends to extend formal or informal Chinese control onto the Korean peninsula. Indeed, one of the main arguments some Chinese have been making for including the ancient kingdom of Kogury ŏ (37 BC – 668 AD) as part of Chinese history is that Kogury ŏ had entered into “ relations” with various states located in China. Although the Chinese have been careful to emphasize that they were talking only about Kogury ŏ and not about Paekche and Silla, nonetheless they may believe that a precedent has been set.

So on the one hand we want China to control North Korea, on the other hand we fear that China may actually do it.

As for myself, I am not surprised that China does not have more influence on North Korea, nor do I have worries that China wants to take territory south of the Yalu . There are two main reasons for my relative lack of worry: history and the experience of the U.S. along its border with Mexico.

By the 10th century, Korea and China had formally established the Yalu river as their border, and that has remained the border ever since. Ten centuries with both sides agreeing on the border is quite a long time, and there is no reason to think it could change, given that there is now a formal treaty demarcating where China stops and where North Korea begins. Of particular interest is the Changbaishan/Paektusan area, which was negotiated between the Qing and Chos ŏn in 1713. In the late 1880s, the Chinese reopened the issue of the border. In the course of these negotiations, the presented documents and maps from the 1710-13 negotiations with

David C. Kang is professor of international relations and business, and director of the Korean Studies Institute, at the University of Southern California. His latest book is East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (Columbia University Press, 2010).

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which to document their case. Rather than risk losing, the Chinese abandoned the negotiation and never returned to the table, and the Korean status quo stood.

After independence in 1945 the newly formed DPRK and PRC needed to demarcate their border. Largely relying on the old border, in 1962 the two sides signed a treaty demarcating the border largely following the traditional border along the Yalu and Tumen . The key negotiating issue had been the placement of the border around Paektusan. Both sides claimed the peak of Paektusan, and it was ultimately a Chinese concession of 60 percent of the land that led to the current border.

None of us know the future, of course, but as yet we have no real evidence that the Chinese government harbors a secret plan to renege on the 1962 treaty and move the border farther south. Yet even so, why is a treaty—a mere piece of paper—so significant for stability? China has been extremely concerned about its own territorial integrity following the “unequal treaties” era of the late nineteenth century. China also faces sizable ethnic populations in Tibet and Xinjiang, both of which only came under Chinese rule relatively recently, in the eighteenth century. Given China’s concerns about “one China” and the claims made for its territorial integrity, and other countries’ suspicions about a rising China’s ambitions, the worst thing China could do is to begin unilaterally renegotiating its borders. If the Korea-China border is up for reconsideration, then all other borders are also up for reconsideration, and it is quite likely that peoples in Tibet, Xinjiang, and other areas will immediately claim their border should be re-drawn to exclude China. Furthermore, if China makes a land-grab on the Korean peninsula, the world would be immediately convinced that China is a major threat, and adjust their policies accordingly.

Thus, there is little practical reason to fear that China harbors secret intentions to conquer Korea. But why does China not exercise more influence over North Korea?

Certainly China has considerable economic influence over North Korea, and the ruling regime in North Korea relies on China for advice and support. Chinese have announced plans to invest up to $600 million in North Korea over the next decade, and traders – both legal and illegal – regularly cross between the two sides. Yet China probably has less ability to control North Korean behavior than we think. The best way to understand this lack of influence may be to consider the difficulties the U.S. has in stabilizing its own border with Mexico.

There is a fairly violent “drug war” going on in Mexico, with reports that at least 34,000 Mexican people have been killed in drug-related violence since the Mexican government began its pressure on the drug cartels in 2006. In Juarez alone, there were 3,000 murders in 2010, as

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two gangs continue to fight for control. Mexican governmental and police control along its northern border is minimal at best, with some towns evidently being run by drug cartels themselves. Furthermore, waves of legal and illegal immigrants continue to attempt to enter America, prompting an emotional debate in the United States and leading the U.S. to spend billions of dollars building our own “great wall” in an attempt to stem the flow. In 2010, for example, President Obama deployed an additional 1,250 National Guards to the Arizona border, and there are plans to increase the number of border patrol agents by 1,000 this year, in addition to those already deployed.

Yet among the many responses suggested about how to stabilize and protect the U.S.-Mexico border, one option that is not considered is actual U.S. military intervention. For so many reasons this is simply not going to happen – our own relations with the Mexican government and people would be irreparably harmed, our own realization that we would probably get caught in a social, political, and economic quagmire, and the outrage against the U.S. that would erupt in Latin America and elsewhere. Thus, despite the problems on our own border, actual intervention is unrealistic and we attempt to contain the problem and support and help the Mexican government, rather than interfering too directly ourselves.

In a similar way, the Chinese are probably facing the same vexing questions with North Korea. It is not at all clear that direct Chinese intervention would improve the situation for themselves or the North Koreans, nor is it clear that China could actually force the North Korean government to do its bidding. However, it is a relatively safe prediction that if China attempted to influence North Korean actions or policies too directly or obviously that the North Korean regime itself would react quite negatively. Indeed, many of those observers already suspicious of a “rising China” would see this as further evidence that China is not to be trusted to respect other countries’ sovereignty or that China harbors secret ambitions to once again become an imperial power.

Thus, the China-North Korea relationship is important and perhaps even the key to unlocking the North Korean problem. But probably China has less influence than we think, and the extreme scenarios – both positive and negative – are probably unlikely to occur.

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