China’s move to ban coal imports from North Korea, effectively slicing the country’s exports by about half, came with a message for the US and its allies: It’s time to do a deal.
Authorities in Beijing announced on Saturday that China would halt all shipments from Kim Jong-un’s regime until the end of the year, in compliance with UN Security Council resolutions over North Korea’s nuclear programme.
At the same time, Chinese officials said that pushing North Korea into a corner won’t work as Kim’s regime will keep developing its nuclear capability until it feels safe. Instead, it’s time to restart talks and “break the negative cycle on the nuclear issue,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a statement yesterday after meeting South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-se at a security meeting in Munich.
“The Chinese are getting more frustrated with North Korea,” Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer said in an interview at the same conference. “They clearly don’t feel that they have a lot of influence and they’re worried that the US under Trump is going to blame China as opposed to continuing a multilateral process.”
China’s call for a new initiative contrasts with a more hawkish tone out of Washington. President Donald Trump, who during his campaign said he could negotiate with Kim over a hamburger, this month promised to deal with North Korea “very strongly” after its latest missile test. He also called on China to get tougher. The US is putting a defence system called Thaad in South Korea – a move that also potentially threatens Beijing’s military capabilities.
China may soon have company in making the shift. South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye was impeached in December and the leading candidates to replace her all take a softer line on North Korea, with front-runner Moon Jae-in saying that the next administration should review the decision to deploy Thaad.
The assassination of Kim’s estranged half-brother, who was protected by Chinese authorities, added to calls in Beijing’s foreign policy establishment to take stronger action, according to Shi Yongming, an associate research fellow at the Foreign Ministry-run China Institute of International Studies.
“The case fully exposed the desperate irrationality of the Kim regime,” Shi said. “Beijing still wants to bring him to a negotiation table – and that’s where the US role lies – because the collapse of the regime is right now outside China’s realistic capacity to handle.”
China has backed the Kim dynasty since it took charge after the Korean War, in part to prevent having a US ally on its border. With the international community enforcing sanctions on North Korea after a series of nuclear tests, China now accounts for more than 90% of its total trade.
Coal sales accounted for more than 50% of North Korea’s exports to China last year, and about a fifth of its total trade, according to Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. China had previously bought coal under exemptions that allowed trade for “livelihood” purposes. China’s Ministry of Commerce didn’t respond to faxed questions outside office hours.
“Of course they may have methods to replace the damage, but just by looking at the size of the loss, that’s a pretty big blow,” Yang said.
For China, the move may have little impact: The country is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal, and North Korea accounts for less than 10% of its imports of the fuel. The restrictions also come as China’s peak winter demand season begins winding down and regulators weigh reinstating domestic mining output limits to avoid the re-emergence of a supply glut.
Whether it will bring Kim’s regime to the negotiating table is unclear. North Korea has accelerated its development of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles since 2009, when it walked away from six-party talks involving the US, South Korea, China, Russia and Japan.
Fu Ying, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s legislature and was a vice foreign minister until 2013, said on Saturday that US policy is only making things worse.
“You have to realize - without talking with them, you will only drive them in the wrong direction,” she said at a security forum in Germany while on stage with South Korea’s Yun and US Senator Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican.
Sullivan said the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic patience” hadn’t borne fruit. “Most people are viewing that now as a failed policy,” he said, calling on China to use its leverage over North Korea “in a more constructive way.”
In Yun’s talks with his Chinese counterpart, Wang urged South Korea to resume negotiations and reiterated China’s opposition to the deployment of Thaad.
Trump’s administration has said it will deploy the missile defence system this year in South Korea and back Japan “100%” in moves to deter North Korea. It has also signalled a willingness to work with China after sharp criticism on the campaign trail, and Trump has told President Xi Jinping that the US will respect the One-China policy.
While China has previously resisted calls by the US to apply greater pressure on Kim’s regime, North Korea is increasingly becoming a strategic liability, according to Zhou Qi, director of the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“What we’re seeing now is Beijing is showing a new willingness to bring the North to near the breaking point,” she said. “There is still some room to squeeze the regime. But of course, it’s a risky card to play.”

Trump has four main options for stopping missiles


Bloomberg/Seoul


Kim Jong-un became the first head of state to grab President-elect Donald Trump’s attention in 2017, after the North Korean leader said he was close to test-firing a missile capable of hitting the continental US. “It won’t happen!” Trump retorted early January on Twitter.
Still, Trump gave no specifics on how he’d actually do that. Presidents from Bill Clinton to George H W Bush to Barack Obama have failed to stop North Korea moving closer to gaining the capability to strike the US with a nuclear weapon. That leaves the incoming president facing what is potentially the biggest challenge yet from the reclusive regime in Pyongyang.
“Trump has yet to look deeply into the North Korean conundrum, and when he does he’ll realise there are only two choices: Hit them or talk to them,” said Park Hwee-rhak, head of the Graduate School of Politics and Leadership at Seoul’s Kookmin University. “No matter what you do, Kim will never give up his nuclear missile development. Thinking otherwise is belying reality.”
Here are four options that Trump may consider to make good on his statement.


Military strike
In 1994, the US deployed an aircraft carrier for a potential strike on North Korea’s nuclear compound, according to a memoir published in 2000 by former South Korean president Kim Young-sam. The crisis ended after talks between ex-president Jimmy Carter and North Korean founder Kim Il Sung.
The costs of a strike would be higher now. North Korea’s arsenal has grown with five nuclear tests since 2006. A surgical attack risks provoking a full-fledged war that could kill millions of people on the peninsula – including in South Korea, a key American ally.
Still, the idea of striking North Korea first has gained traction in South Korea in recent years. The nation is spending billions of dollars to buy weapons, including F-35 fighters, that would allow its military to conduct a first strike should Kim’s regime show signs of an imminent nuclear launch.


Talks
The last six-nation nuclear talks with North Korea – a process that included the US – were held in 2008, and have been stalled since. The current US administration insists Kim agree to denuclearisation as a condition for talks to even be held. But Pyongyang has enshrined its nuclear arms in the constitution, and Kim has said the programme isn’t up for negotiation.
Trump, a real estate billionaire who authored The Art of the Deal, said during his campaign he could negotiate directly with Kim over a hamburger to end his nuclear ambitions. But he’s also likened Kim to a “maniac” and said he would get China to “make that guy disappear in one form or another.”
“Trump touts himself as the master of deals,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “He’ll try to talk first, and when he does he should make sure North Korea understands the military consequences of violating an agreement.”


Missile defence
The US has been permission to deploy a high-altitude missile defence system known as Thaad on South Korea’s soil after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January last year. Once installed, Thaad would join a network of American missile defence systems across the Pacific that aim to stop North Korean missiles reaching the continental US
The Pentagon has said previously it plans to next test its ground-based system to destroy missiles aimed at the US in the first quarter of this year. A spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency said in September it has “demonstrated partial capability” against “small numbers of simple ballistic missile threats launched from North Korea and Iran.”
That same month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told an audience in Washington that policy makers must assume that North Korea is able to hit the US with a nuclear- armed missile.
The US has a “layered” missile defence system to deter North Korea, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters on January 3. He declined to say if the US would shoot down a North Korean missile, and would not discuss if its West Coast system would be effective against an intercontinental ballistic missile.


China
Trump may lean more on China, which provides most of North Korea’s energy and food, to push Kim to abandon his nuclear programme and missile tests. The president-elect said in another tweet in early January that China “won’t help with North Korea” even though it “has been taking out massive amounts of money and wealth from the US.”
But so far, Beijing’s denouncements of North Korea’s nuclear programme have had little impact. Kim’s comment on the inter-continental ballistic missile came after China agreed in November to UN sanctions that included cutting North Korea’s coal exports, one of the few sources of hard currency for his regime.