Explaining Chinese Foreign Policy toward North Korea: navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of proliferation and instability

This article examines the sources of Chinese foreign policy in a particularly important case—recent policy toward North Korea. It surveys that policy in several areas: the economic backdrop, leading the six party talks, permissive support for United Nations Security Council measures, signals—some rhetorical, others more tangible—warning against future transgressions, and some coercive measures that impose costs on North Korea today. In sum, it finds Beijing has wielded a number of coercive tools aimed a North Korea, while avoiding excesses that might lead to spirals on the peninsula or regionally. Defensive realism best explains this policy, both in the aggregate and in detail in many cases. Offensive realism, strategic culture, and bureaucratic politics approaches do a particularly poor job of explaining outcomes in what should be for each of them a relatively easy case. This has important implications for understanding the sources of Chinese foreign policy in other areas. Further, on North Korea policy, while it is important for American policy makers to recognize that Beijing is not working fundamentally at cross-purposes to Washington's own goals, it is also important to recognize that Beijing has mixed motives.