forces on the peninsula permanently. The Chinese were willing to settle for the retention of a buffer Korean state and considered accepting Japanese occupation of southern Korea, calling frequent cease-fires during the war that the Koreans saw as too beneficial to Japanese and Chinese interests but not to their own. The intervention during the Japanese invasion, like the later intervention during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, was not based on the interests of the Koreans but very much on the interests of the Chinese.
Despite Korea’s concerns about possible Chinese domination, since the seventh century the various Korean kingdoms managed to largely retain their independence by nominally acceding to China’s imperial vision and accepting a special relationship with the Chinese dynasties. This allowed China to remain confident in Korea’s loyalty on the border and gave Korea a relative assurance that China would not invade it. For both, it was a combination of convenience and necessity that drove relations.
The pattern continued with only a few interruptions into the 19th century, even as China was being worn down by European colonial powers. China vigorously defended Korea’s right to remain isolated from the rest of the world. Beijing was not strong enough to use military power to ensure Korea’s continued role as a strategic buffer but rather exploited its special relationship with Korea diplomatically. Beijing would alternate between claiming a suzerainty relationship with Korea, making it the only path to dialogue with the Hermit Kingdom, and claiming that despite the special relationship the Koreans set their own foreign policy and China was not responsible for their actions. China’s main objective here was to keep Korea out of the hands of foreigners.
Ultimately, China failed. Amid the complex maneuvering between the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Koreans and others in the early 20th century, Japan took control of the Korean Peninsula. Holding Korea effectively ensured that there was little chance that China or another power could use the territory to stage an invasion of Japan. Possession of Korea also helped the Japanese to seize more of Manchuria, reinforcing to China just how important Korea is to China’s national security interests.
Korea as a Strategic Asset
At the end of World War II, China was focused on its internal civil war and was not yet prepared to re-establish a special relationship with Korea. But by 1949, the Chinese Communists had largely emerged victorious at home and the Soviet occupying forces in North Korea had left. North Korea’s new Communist government, formed after the Japanese withdrawal and the peninsula’s division in 1945, consulted with or perhaps manipulated Moscow and Beijing into offering their political and military backing for an invasion of the South.
At the same time that Pyongyang was preparing its invasion into South Korea, China was preparing a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. But China’s plans had to be shelved. Only days after hostilities broke out between North and South Korea in June 1950, the United States deployed ships to the Taiwan Strait to protect the Nationalist government in Taipei. When the North’s forces were halted and pushed back to the Yalu months later, China had no choice but to shift its attention away from Taiwan and enter the Korean War to deal with the much more pressing threat along its border.
The Soviets, concerned that a successful move by Beijing to defeat the Nationalists in Taiwan would then free Beijing to make political overtures to the United States, gained in the Korean War continued animosity between the United States and China. North Korea’s actions, while they could have been beneficial for China had they succeeded, instead undermined Beijing’s reconquest of Taiwan, locked Communist China into two more decades of contentious relations with the United States and ultimately left China responsible for supporting a faltering state on a critical border. The North Koreans were grateful for Chinese intervention but recognized that, as in past interventions, the Chinese were once again willing to settle for a divided Korea, so long as they could retain their buffer.
Although the North Koreans were able to draw on the emerging Sino-Soviet split after the Korean War to gain economic concessions from the competing Communist powers, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War left the North Korean regime with a stark choice: risk losing control over the country amid attempts at reform and opening (the example of the Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe did little to encourage this path) or accept the risk of a single sponsor state in China. Pyongyang sought another path; it would build a strong domestic deterrent to any military action while also threatening to use that deterrent to try to extract economic concessions out of the Americans, Japanese, South Koreans and anyone else concerned about peace and stability. Pyongyang would also draw on China’s continued fear of losing its strategic buffer.
Although largely effective in the past, this policy is beginning to see diminishing returns. North Korea is now even more dependent upon China than before, but China is as much a hostage to the relationship as North Korea is. Beijing has used the various North Korean crises to its own advantage, offering to mediate talks in return for political concessions from the United
