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How long will China allow North Korea to hold the world hostage?
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It can't be about the economic strategic value. Maybe the countryside's nice?
While the American media is understandably enthralled with the story of Captain Richard Phillips, the American skipper who offered himself as hostage to Somali pirates for the safety of his crew, it feels as if another story has been swept under the rug. More than three weeks ago, two American reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were kidnapped by North Korean forces on the border with China, and are being detained and threatened with hard prison labor for nameless "hostile acts".
There would be some temptation to outrage over the neglect of this issue, since Somalia is, after all, a completely and utterly failed and collapsed state with piracy as a main source of income and no government that can reasonably be expected to prevent the actions of people whose entire stock and trade is holding ships and crew hostage.
The truth, of course, is that Kim Jong-il is a kidnapper par excellence, and has a much more organized piracy bracket than Somalia can boast. Japan and South Korea's relations with their industrially backwards neighbor has been poisoned for decades by both the tinpot dictatorship's tendency to point and test missiles at the two, as well as the penchant for kidnapping their citizens.
While Deepak Chopra, in what can only be described as the triumph of hope over experience, believes that President Obama can usher in a "new method" of global diplomacy by resolving this situation peacefully, back in the real world we have only too much evidence of the facts;
North Korea is a cesspit, one of the last remaining pockets of truly abject poverty and crushing authoritarianism outside of Africa. Although it does not allow anyone to take census to measure it's HDI or GDP in meaningful terms, there are more than enough indicators (see accompanying picture, for instance) that their economy has been long since run into the ground. Although some military hawks try to play it up as some sort of great threat, it's far more of a paper tiger than Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard ever was. They could at least actually win wars, provided it was against comparably sized adversaries that didn't happen to be the reigning world superpower; the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", however, is in a constant life and death struggle simply to feed it's own populace in peacetime; it simply doesn't have the logistical capacity to actually wage a war with it's armed forces, which- while the largest in the world outside of America, China, India and Russia- largely consists of undertrained men with guns; barely sufficient for early 20th century warfare, let alone the 21st. The Axis lost the second World War largely because of an inability to keep both their soldiers and their ships fueled, and they were certainly far better positioned for that task than Krazy Kim.
So how does the unstable leader of a barren wasteland of a nation, where industry is destroyed, education consists of brainwashing, and the primary function of the vast armed forces is to prevent people from escaping to more prosperous climes- flaunting international resolutions by testing long-range missiles and nuclear bombs- stay afloat?
To address the elephant in the room (or perhaps the dragon); because China lets it. As we see time and again. In fairness, Russia joins in on the security council issue, but while Russia is a world power militarily, it doesn't have the economic reach anymore to really dictate policy on this scale. The international community leaves North Korea alone for the simple reason that they know that China will protect it.
And on one level, believe me, I kind of understand it. After millenia as one of the most advanced, powerful nations on the face of the Earth, China spent the 19th century repeatedly humiliated, humbled, wronged and abused by Western powers, all of which combined couldn't have hoped to take on Zhong Guo a couple centuries before. And when European influence started to wane in the early-to-mid 20th century, it was immediately replaced by the exploitation of Imperial Japan, and then finally by the smothering patronage of Stalin. Given the past couple hundred years of violent invasion and exploitation of the Middle Kingdom by outsiders, as well as the fact that it's only recently been given the due a nation with 1/5 of the World's population might expect, one can sort of understand where Chinese Nationalism comes from. Especially, as I mentioned before, with Steven Spielberg making insipid and uninformed movies.
However. While one understands a strong reaction bred by history as, for instance, one understands Israelis' inclination to take Iranian threats more seriously than many Europeans tend to, a distrust of foreign interference shouldn't extend as far as to protect a rogue regime that kidnaps it's neighbors people and holds them hostage, or comes within a hair's breadth of threatening a nuclear war.
And it's so unnecessary. North Korea's primary exports to China are poverty, hunger, and the few lucky refugees that make it over the border. North Korea is not an ally to China but a burden. Even the threat of waning support from it's mightiest (and only) protector would force Pyongyang to at least stop harassing it's neighbors citizens, even if it will insist on tormenting it's own.
The West is hardly in a strong position to lecture Beijing at the moment, but if the PRC wants to be taken seriously as a superpower, it might consider exerting some of that considerable muscle to rein in it's neighbors. Saying "no" to kidnapping citizens of it's largest trading partners on it's own territory would be a considerable good start.
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