Angry North Korea Response To Beijing Coal Import Ban Sends Relations Plummeting — Chinese Analysts Shocked By Pyongyang Comments – But Say China Now Has Little Further Leverage

North Korea’s furious response to Beijing’s suspension of coal imports – which have been a major support for the North’s weak economy – are a sign relations may have reached a breaking point. At the same time, Chinese analysts correctly note Beijing now has little remaining leverage. Here, a portrait of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, in Pyongyang last week. China’s Xi Jinping is said to have low regard for Kim, who has not visited China and is not known to have been invited.

The diatribe, carried by the Korean Central News Agency, came just before

the Malaysian government announced that VX nerve agent had killed Kim Jong-nam,

the half brother of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

North Korean agents are suspected of masterminding the attack.

A silk mill in Pyongyang this week. North Korea’s cash-starved economy will suffer from Beijing’s decision to cut off coal imports.

The disclosure that a chemical weapon banned under international treaties was used in the attack

is sure to put more pressure on China’s relations with North Korea,

which some Chinese analysts say are at their lowest point since the founding of the North as a separate country after World War II.

The disclosure “makes things worse,” Cheng said.

“It’s wrong to kill the half brother. It’s more wrong to have used banned chemical agents.”

Earlier this month, the North issued a more indirect takedown of Beijing in its government newspaper Minju Joson, signaling a growing rift.

Shortly afterward, China announced the suspension of coal imports.

The burst of criticisms from Pyongyang — coupled with Beijing’s coal ban — suggested

boiling tensions between China’s president, Xi Jinping, 63, who sees himself as a global leader, and Kim, 33, an eccentric dictator.

Xi is said to have low regard for Kim, who has not visited China and is not known to have been invited.

Despite past periods of turbulence, including under Mao Zedong,

both sides have more or less tried to preserve a polite public veneer of amity.

But the friendship was a myth, said Shen Zhihua, a professor of history at East China Normal University.

The view from the landmark Juche Tower in Pyongyang last week. The rift between China and North Korea has emerged as the United States has pushed for Beijing to do more to curb Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

The Chinese government has always viewed North Korea as a “vassal country,”

he said in an interview with Phoenix Television on Thursday, shortly before the North Korean editorial was published.

“You can go through the People’s Daily from 1949 to this day,

we have never said a single word of ill, all words of praise,” about North Korea,

said Shen, who is one of China’s pre-eminent historians on the North.

“Meanwhile, the North Korean newspapers do not speak ill of China.”

Even as the relationship has noticeably worsened in recent weeks, China has maintained public restraint.

An editorial in Global Times, a state-run tabloid that reflects the thinking of senior government officials, noted on Friday that

the suspension of coal imports was “fair” and in keeping with United Nations sanctions.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry also maintained that line.

“China and North Korea are friendly neighbors, and we are willing to work with the North Korean side in joint efforts to develop healthy and stable relations,”

said Geng Shuang, the ministry spokesman.

The ministry also played down the significance of the Malaysian announcement that VX had been used in the killing of Kim Jong-nam.

“It is only a preliminary result published by Malaysia, and there is not conclusion on this yet,” Geng said.

A coal-powered power station in Pyongyang. China said it was ending imports of North Korean coal because it had already met the quota permitted under United Nations sanctions.

It was not immediately clear how much China’s ban on coal imports would affect North Korea’s ability to look after its population.

And at least publicly, China said that it was imposing the ban only because

it had already fulfilled its coal quota allowed under United Nations sanctions.

That seemed to suggest that Beijing may have already paid Pyongyang for the coal it imported in the first 50 days of this year,

money that would go directly to the North’s cash-starved government, experts said.

The exposure of the deepening rift comes as the Trump administration has been pressuring Beijing

to use its [now, almost non-existent,] leverage to curtail the North’s rapidly expanding nuclear weapons program.

President Trump has said China can do significantly more to persuade the North to scale back its nuclear program,

even as Beijing has told Washington that it holds limited influence.

The latest flare-up is likely to further weaken that leverage,

while illustrating the resistance of Kim Jong-un to China’s arguments in favor of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

“In terms of diplomacy, I see no solution,” said Yan Xuetong, the director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University.

Yan, writing in the Chinese news media this week, said that China had no choice but to accept the North as a nuclear-armed state.

That was because China had only two options:

either a nuclear North Korea that was friendly toward China —

or a nuclear North Korea that was unfriendly, he wrote.

“I am very pessimistic about this issue,” Yan said.”

Source: China and North Korea Reveal Sudden, and Deep, Cracks in Their Friendship – The New York Times