China backs North Korea punishment but won’t abandon unruly ally, analysts say

China’s embrace of the new U.N. sanctions against North Korea suggests Beijing finally may be aligning with Washington, Seoul and Tokyo on the need to punish Pyongyang for its recent nuclear bomb test and other weapons provocations.

But most analysts say the Obama administration shouldn’t be fooled: The Chinese are still far from abandoning their unruly strategic ally.

The question of where Beijing truly stands on Pyongyang has hung like a specter over this week’s Nuclear Security Summit in Washington and factored heavily into President Obama’s meetings with North Asian leaders.

While the U.S. has long urged China to take a more forceful role in pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program, the situation has grown increasingly tense since early January, when Pyongyang claimed to have tested a miniaturized nuclear bomb.

A subsequent satellite launch and series of missile tests prompted the U.N. Security Council to level biting new economic sanctions against North Korea.

Seoul and Tokyo are seen as key to making the sanctions stick. But there is uncertainty over China, which imports some $860 million worth of coal from North Korea annually and has long stood as Pyongyang’s main economic ally.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe emerged from joint talks with Mr. Obama on Thursday vowing to deepen their collective pressure on North Korea.

Mr. Obama sought to convey a similar message on his way into a one-on-one meeting with Chinese President Xi Jingping on Thursday afternoon, claiming that the two would “discuss how we can discourage actions like nuclear missile tests that escalate tensions and violate international obligations.”

But with so many issues on the table between Beijing and Washington — including cybersecurity, trade deficits and the increasingly hectic maritime disputes in the South China Sea — many analysts contend that real progress on North Korea is unlikely.

“[One] constraint that ends up upending U.S.-China cooperation on North Korea is that there are just too many issues on the U.S.-China agenda to focus on [this],” says Scott A. Snyder, who heads the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“The only way the both are going to focus on North Korea is if it becomes the top issue between them, over the South China Sea and cybersecurity and every other issue that now burdens the relationship,” Mr. Snyder said in an interview. “The only way both are going to focus on it is if there’s a bigger crisis than the one that’s precipitated by nuclear tests.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Xi has drawn praise from some analysts, who say his government is pursuing the U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang with unprecedented focus and aggression — even moving to limit the access of North Korean ships to certain Chinese ports.

China is “at long last prepared to connect the dots in its relations with North Korea,” said Jonathan D. Pollack, a China analyst with the Brookings Institution who argues that Beijing has “now decided to make Pyongyang feel the pain.”

“For the first time, China has begun to fully acknowledge that North Korean actions pose a direct threat to vital Chinese security interests,” Mr. Pollack wrote on the Brookings website. “Beijing is no longer prepared to rationalize or ignore the threat.”

He pointed to a March 11 editorial in China’s Global Times that called on North Koreans to recognize that the U.S. “has the strength to drastically change the rules of the game.”

It also warned that “Pyongyang should not expect China to be able to protect its security through [U.N. Security Council] channels when it engages in reckless risk taking. What it creates will be a situation that China simply cannot control.”

’Dim the lights’

Mr. Pollack’s assessment was bolstered Thursday by Zhu Feng, a professor at China’s Nanjing University and co-editor of the book “America, China and the Struggle for World Order.”

Writing in the opinion section of The New York Times, Mr. Zhu asserted that China “now clearly sees North Korea as a burden” and that Chinese support for the recent U.N. sanctions appears to signal Beijing’s “political abandonment of its traditional ally.”

Others say such assessments are premature.

Patrick Cronin, who heads the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for New American Security in Washington, says China’s embrace of the sanctions fits within Beijing’s desire to remain the “dominant driver over how to calibrate pressure and negotiation with North Korea.”

“The way to do it is to make North Korea more dependent on China, by first putting some pressure on Pyongyang and then backing off,” Mr. Cronin said in an interview.

“It’s like a little dial that China is going to control,” he said. “Beijing can be expected to dim the lights a bit to show Washington and others that, ’Yeah, we’re putting pressure on Pyongyang.’ But really, they don’t want to turn the lights all the way off, and they will brighten the room again when North Korea gives them something.

“The pressure will be relaxed at the first moment that Pyongyang hints at returning to a diplomatic track over its nuclear program,” Mr. Cronin added.

Bruce Klingner, a senior fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center in Washington, pointed to a pattern in which China has ramped up and then eased pressure on Pyongyang in the aftermath of North Korean nuclear tests, particularly in 2006, 2009 and 2013.

“China for a short period of time has implemented sanctions, and then the implementation tends to weaken and tapper off,” Mr. Klingner said. “I think for now this is real, and we hope that China has finally become so impatient with its ally that it more fully implements the U.N. resolutions — but the jury is still out.”

Mr. Klingner said there have been “encouraging signs,” such as reports of Chinese banks beginning to cut engagements with North Korea. But he added that it’s unclear whether such actions are being directed by the Chinese government or that the banks are acting on their own out of fear that they, themselves, may be targeted by expanded sanctions.

Others say there is little evidence to suggest that Beijing is engaged in anything but a strategic ruse while it maintains a steady back-channel alliance with the North Koreans.

“China’s been trying to persuade gullible Americans for many years that they have no influence on North Korea and even recently they dropped hints that Beijing and Pyongyang have a frosty relationship,” said Michael Pillsbury, who heads the Center for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute.

“On the other hand, our intelligence community has accurately reported extensive defense and intelligence relationships between China and North Korea,” Mr. Pillsbury said. “We have to follow Reagan’s advice and trust but verify.”

He pointed to suspicion that China turns a blind eye to illicit collaboration between North Korea and Iran.

“My hope is China will denounce the North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technology to Iran,” he said. “China should not permit suspicious North Korean flights over Chinese territory to Iran. That would be a true test of China’s claims not to be a close ally of North Korea.”