By Trefor Moss
China has good reasons for supporting North Korea: Pyongyang’s implosion would be an almighty headache, with potentially millions of half-starved refugees pouring across the border looking for Beijing to solve their problems. China’s policy, understandably, is to keep the North’s humanitarian horrors on the far side of the Yalu River.
Beijing therefore turns a blind eye to the cross-border black-market activities that keep the North Korean economy on life support, despite their drain on China’s own resources. It plays its tired part in boosting the North Korean leader’s status, doing what it can to help stave off regime collapse by hosting the Kims in Beijing and offering quotable assurances of solidarity. It also jumps, with impressive patience, through the diplomatic hoops of having constantly to fight North Korea’s losing corner at the United Nations and other international forums.
But when it comes to last week’s revelation that China may be supplying North Korea with technology in contravention of U.N. sanctions, the rationale is much less obvious. It was reported by Jane’s Defence Weekly that a new transporter erector launcher (TEL) system debuted by North Korea at a recent military parade looked suspiciously like a known Chinese system. Following the report, the U.S. government, among others, admitted that they, too, had noticed the similarity. The U.N. Security Council committee whose job it is to monitor these sanctions – a job, some have noted, that it doesn’t seem terribly good at – is reportedly investigating.
Read the full story at The Diplomat