CINA

본문

Following article was already published yesterday in NYT/IHT:

Tension and desperation on the China-Korea line 

North Korea's porous 1,400-kilometer border with China is its lifeline to the outside world. About 39 percent of its trade last year was with China, which, critically, supplies it with 80 to 90 percent of its oil. Trafficking in money transfers and human beings also flourishes.

By contrast, the North's border with Russia is 18 kilometers long, or 11 miles, and heavily guarded, and the 240-kilometer-long Demilitarized Zone with South Korea has hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side.

Until now, the North's ships have regularly visited Japan, from which relatives sent cash and goods, but North Korea's nuclear test was expected to end that trade.

For China, the bottom line is to erect the right number of fences, as it did last week along the border city of Dandong. Build too few and you invite instability in China. Build too many and North Korea collapses.

A collapse is something Beijing does not want, and why it is lukewarm toward harsh United Nations sanctions. A collapse might send more North Koreans into China than the 100,000 to 300,000 estimated to have flooded the border during the North's great famine in the mid- to late-1990s. (Paradoxically, the famine also opened trade links when local North Korean groups formed to barter raw materials for Chinese grain.)

The end of the North Korean state could also bring reunification of the Korean Peninsula under America's ally South Korea, another development Beijing does not want.

Also, the border itself could be put into question. In recent years, South Korea has challenged China over the legacy of Koguryo, an ancient Korean kingdom whose rule extended into present-day China. The region is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic- Korean Chinese who might be sympathetic to a reunified Korea making territorial claims.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/22/news/border.php