BY EVA CHENG
For more than five decades, Washington has justified its strong military presence in north-east Asia in the name of countering "communism". Even though pro-capitalist governments now rule Russia and China, Washington has shown no interest in removing its military forces from their Pacific borders. Instead, it is looking for new excuses to justify their presence.
Whipping up new fears about North Korea fits nicely into Washington's scheme. The US rulers need to maintain a strong military presence in north-east Asia, not because of any real threat posed by North Korea, but in order to maintain US political leverage over Japan, which is still the US capitalists' biggest single competitor in the world market, and to maintain pressure upon Russia and China — both of which are nuclear powers outside the framework of any US-dominated military alliance.
Due to its significant conventional and nuclear arsenals and its substantial armaments industry, Russia remains a key strategic rival to Washington for arms sales and political influence in many parts of the world. But in Asia, China has been the main barrier to Washington's imperial ambitions.
After the Communist victory in China in 1949, the US propped up a pro-imperialist rival regime on the island of Taiwan. Even today, Washington is still selling arms to Taiwan to keep up pressure on Beijing.
Another of Washington's means to pressure China revolves around the Korean peninsula. With a common border and both being victims of Japanese imperialist domination until 1945, the resistance movements in China and Korea had long solidarised with each other until Japan's 1945 defeat. That collaboration was strengthened during the 1950-53 Korean War when post-capitalist North Korea fought against the US-backed capitalist regime in South Korea.
Partly for its own survival (knowing full well that China would be in grave danger if North Korea was crushed by the US), the new Communist government in Beijing backed Pyongyang during the war against the US (at the cost, for example, of one million Chinese soldiers' lives).
US troops have remained in South Korea on the pretext that North Korea could attack the south at any time.
After the alliance between the Communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing broke down in the early 1960s — largely because Moscow would not extend its nuclear deterrence against US attacks to include China — both of them were keen to recruit Pyongyang to their respective camps. Both of them, for example, struck separate "friendship and mutual assistance" treaties with North Korea in 1961.
A year later, Moscow severed its aid to Pyongyang. However, Soviet aid resumed in 1965 — as soon as Pyongyang's relationship with Beijing deteriorated following military clashes between the two countries over the disputed Mount Baekdu (Zhangbaishan in Chinese).
China and North Korea fought again in 1968, leading China to unilaterally close its border with North Korea.
Pyongyang continued to keep Beijing at arms' length throughout the 1970s and 1980s in view of the latter's rapprochement towards the US in the early 1970s, the normalisation of Sino-US relations in 1979 and the beginning of China's extension of market relations in the 1980s.
The frosty relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing started to ease in the late 1980s but was soon hit again by Beijing's 1992 establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea.
The Soviet Union wasn't there to provide a lifeline to North Korea, however. With the turn of the Russian ruling bureaucratic elite toward capitalist restoration, Moscow demanded Pyongyang pay for its purchases of energy and food supplies in Western currencies, thus directly contributing to the subsequent sharp deterioration of North Korea's economy.
Meanwhile, the ruling bureaucratic elite in China was busy recruiting South Korea into its drive to restore capitalism. In a similar way to the role played in the 1990s by Hong Kong in assisting the restoration of capitalism in southern China, South Korean capitalists are a source of capital investment and managerial experience for the restoration of capitalism in northern China.
Sino-South Korean trade jumped from US$3 billion in 1991 to $38 billion in 2002. China also surpassed the US to become the number one destination for South Korean direct foreign investment in 2002, receiving $1.72 billion that year, or nearly four times the 2001 figure.
Thanks to the big growth in cargo flights to China, South Korea's Incheon airport has become the world's fourth largest in international cargo management. South Korea has also become the primary trans-shipment centre between north-east China and the rest of the world.
"Socialist solidarity" with China's impoverished ally in Pyongyang, while given lip service, has been limited in practice. When China's top leader since 1989, Jiang Zemin, visited Pyongyang in early September 2001, it was his first such visit to North Korea in 11 years.
Jiang's visit came only after two visits to China by North Korea's top leader, Kim Jong-Il, in the space of eight months in 2000-01.
To mark Jiang's trip, Beijing promised Pyongyang 30,000 tonnes of diesel fuel and 200,000 tonnes of food. Then in April 2002, Beijing offered Pyongyang another one-off grant-in-aid worth $6 million. This came on top of the regular yearly drip-fed assistance of a reported 1 million tonnes of oil and 1.5 million tonnes of coking coal.
The one-off gifts may be aimed at shoring up Beijing's immediate influence with Pyongyang so as to increase Beijing's bargaining position with Washington, South Korea and Japan. Moreover, with already an estimated 30,000-200,000 illegal North Korean refugees hiding in China, that flow can turn into a flood if Pyongyang's crisis escalates, straining China-Korean relations.
Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia clearly prioritised its relationship with Seoul ahead of Pyongyang. The current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, seems to realise the importance of relations with North Korea, given the latter's strategic location, if the Russian-South Korean business relationship is really to take off.
The construction, partly based on existing networks, of a rail and road link between the inter-Korean system and the trans-Siberian corridor was a key agreement coming out of Putin's July 2000 visit to Pyongyang. Also discussed, among other projects, was the construction of a gas pipeline from Russia to North Korea, for possible extension to South Korea, which would be the decisive market on the Korean peninsula.
To lay the ground for these deals, in early 2000 Moscow signed a new cooperation treaty with Pyongyang to replace the 1961 bilateral agreement. Under the new arrangement, Moscow no longer has the obligation to back Pyongyang militarily in the case of war.
For decades, the Beijing-Pyongyang and Moscow-Pyongyang bilateral relationships had been highly competitive, framed within the conflicting interests of the Soviet and Chinese bureaucratic post-capitalist regimes. They are now coordinated within a new framework of Sino-Russian collaboration to enhance one another's capitalist development.
Coming out of their joint summit in April 2002, Putin and Jiang affirmed their united stance for a non-nuclear Korean peninsula and stressed the "extreme importance" of Washington normalising its relationship with Pyongyang.
These aspirations, however, don't fit into the US rulers' agenda. While Washington was beating the war drum in preparation for its invasion of Iraq, it was also escalating its propaganda and diplomatic offensive against Pyongyang, seeking to provoke an increasingly desperate North Korea to adopt a belligerent stance that the US can use to manufacture a "North Korean threat".
Pyongyang's insistence on its right to possess a nuclear deterrent is not hard to understand considering that Washington has repeatedly threatened to attack North Korea over the last 50 years and refuses to negotiate a formal end to the Korean War and a non-aggression treaty.
Exerting maximum diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang to cave in to Washington's demands is clearly a tactic in the US rulers' drive for world domination. Beijing and Moscow are seeking a role in the diplomatic negotiations over North Korea's nuclear program to safeguard their own interests. North Korea's right to handle its affairs, including its defence policy, without foreign interference, weigh little in their considerations.
From Green Left Weekly, May 21, 2003.
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