Uneasy Partnerships: China's Engagement With Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform by Thomas Fingar

Author:Thomas Fingar [Fingar, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503601970
Goodreads: 33773960
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

China and Korea*

Proximity, Priorities, and Policy Evolution

Thomas Fingar

For thousands of years, China’s relationships with the Korean Peninsula were shaped primarily by geography. Proximity facilitated economic and cultural interchange beneficial to both but on terms largely dictated by China by virtue of its much greater size, wealth, and population. During much of this long history, China viewed Korea as a vassal state whose primary importance derived from its location between Japan and the Chinese capital. This characterization is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the long and rich history of relations between peoples and polities with much in common but also a powerful sense of their distinctive identities and different interests.1 Moreover, and more important, the region, China, and Korea have changed dramatically in the past century and a quarter. So, too, have China’s priorities and judgments about potential Korean threats and contributions to the achievement of Chinese objectives.2 This chapter examines some of the factors that changed and shaped Chinese perceptions of and policies toward the Korean Peninsula, especially those that have occurred during the era of reform and opening that began in 1979.

Though oversimplified, the characterization of how China views Korea given here contains three elements of continuing importance. The first is proximity. Korea is more salient to China than are most countries because the two share an 880-mile land border adjacent to one of the most populous and prosperous regions of China, and because North Korea is only a few hundred miles from Beijing. Proximity gives China both the incentive and the ability to monitor and to affect what happens on the peninsula.

Proximity magnifies Korea’s geopolitical significance because it intensifies the extent to which Korean policies and actions can enhance or endanger China’s security. For obvious reasons, successive Chinese regimes have paid close attention to real and imagined threats perceived either as originating on the peninsula or to be more dangerous because of Korea’s relationships with China’s rivals. This geography-based fact causes Chinese strategists and policy makers to view what happens on the peninsula through a security-focused lens and to develop policies intended to reduce the threat to China’s interests.3

The third continuing element is also linked, albeit less closely, to Korea’s proximity. That element is Korea’s ability to contribute to China’s economic well-being and, indirectly, to domestic tranquillity and the legitimacy of the regime. Korea’s status as a tributary state was sometimes more nominal than real, but tribute was a form and facilitator of trade, and trade contributed to the prosperity of adjacent regions and ruling elites.4 The ability of Korea and Koreans to contribute to economic growth and prosperity, and thereby to the derivative consequences of economic performance, has been and still is an important part of China’s policy calculus.

The ways in which proximity, security, and economic well-being are conceived and their relative importance have changed over time, but all have been critical to the way in which China has interacted with the peninsula since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Some of the changes

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