By Zachary Keck
A time-honored tradition that is performed in the United States during every Korean crisis is the one where analysts gather around news cameras and speculate over whether this crisis will finally convince China that its interests are in perfect harmony with the United States’ own when it comes to the North Korean regime.
That being said, this speculation has been particularly feverish during this year’s Korean crisis owing to the fact that there are new leaders in Beijing and Pyongyang and many reports suggest they have not gotten along particularly well thus far. Sure, there have been troubling signs that Chinese thinking on North Korea maybe hasn’t changed at all—such as Chinese academics getting censured for merely suggesting that supporting North Korea is no longer in China’s national interest— but inconvenient facts like this shouldn’t be allowed to undermine the hope which serves as the foundation for so much of America’s foreign policy.
And so the stage was set for the Western media to jump on anything Xi Jinping said during his keynote address to the Boao Forum this weekend as evidence of China’s supposed change of heart on North Korea.
The line that produced headlines like “China rebukes North Korea,” and “Is China ready to abandon North Korea?” came in the middle of a long stanza when Xi said, “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains.” At no point in the speech was North Korea or the tensions on the Korean Peninsula even mentioned.
Read the full story at The Diplomat