China's Multilateral Co-Operation in Asia and the Pacific: Institutionalizing Beijing's 'Good Neighbour Policy' by Chien-peng Chung

Author:Chien-peng Chung [Chung, Chien-peng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Ethnic Studies, General, National, Social Science, Political Science, American Government, Regional Studies, Treaties
ISBN: 9781136975622
Google: vh3JBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-06-24T07:07:05+00:00

Institutionalizing the Six-Party Talks: the PRC’s roles

China played a pivotal role in breaking the standoff. As a way of putting pressure on the North Koreans, China had voted for the IAEA resolution that referred the North Korean withdrawal from the NPT to the UN Security Council, even while Russia abstained. The Chinese leadership dispatched Qian Qichen–China’s former Foreign Minister and subsequent foreign policy czar–to Pyongyang to convince the North Korean leadership to stop its nuclear provocations.13 China provided a neutral “good office,” by brokering trilateral talks between the USA, DPRK, and China in April 2003, as a compromise to the other two parties. The USA then impressed upon an initially reluctant China the need to host an expanded series of talks comprising the six parties of the USA, China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. The USA was convinced that China has this role to play because half its foreign aid goes to North Korea, and four-fifths of North Korea’s energy needs are met by fuel imports from China.14 Indeed, China-North Korean trade accounted for about 67 percent of Pyongyang’s total external trade, and China supplies 80 percent of the state’s consumer goods.15 The PRC shares the longest land border with the DPRK, was the state most directly involved on the North Korean side in the Korean War, and still maintains a mutual defense treaty with Pyongyang dating from 1961. In any case, according to China’s official publications, China came out from organizing the trilateral event as a major peacebroker for the region, by performing a constructive role and hence boosting its image as a great power.16 This made the Chinese enthusiastic about playing their mediating role in an expanded 6PT.

To bring all parties of the proposed 6PT to the table, Chinese diplomats engaged in a flurry of “shuttle diplomacy” between Pyongyang, Washington, Tokyo, Seoul, and Moscow in July 2003.17 Since then, every time Pyongyang came to the negotiating table, high-level Chinese delegations to Pyongyang and other capitals of the six party participants seem to have just preceded the dialogues.18 PRC President Hu Jintao personally wrote to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and US President George W. Bush to finalize the first six-party meeting.19 As host of the 6PT, the Chinese spared no efforts to cater to the sensibilities of the negotiating parties. At the Beijing Diaoyutai State Guest House meeting venue, the six state delegations were arranged in alphabetical order around a large hexagonal table, with the DPRK diplomats sitting to the left of the US delegation and opposite the South Korean team.20 These shuttle and tabular arrangements would be the order of business for all subsequent 6PTs–in a sense, an institutionalized norm or structured procedure for the forum. China’s organizing role of the 6PT was all the more remarkable, considering that North Korea’s nuclear program was least likely to be developed for the purpose of threatening China, although strategic uncertainty involving a country on its doorstep was not something China would like to see, and the 6PT

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.