Why China Worries About North Korea

For China, Northeast Asia remains the weak spot in its attempt to secure its immediate borders. Tensions between North Korea and South Korea are mounting, which raises the possibility of conflict that could spill beyond the Korean Peninsula. Security coordination among Japan, South Korea, and the United States is also becoming stronger, putting pressure on China, and North Korea’s entrenched nuclear status has made Japan and South Korea anxious about their own security and could even motivate them to eventually pursue nuclear weapons themselves.

China is increasingly worried about North Korea’s role in creating and intensifying these risks—and about the need to adjust its North Korea strategy to manage them without inflaming tensions and further destabilizing the region. Pyongyang has grown more unpredictable as it has become emboldened by its nuclear program. Decades of international sanctions, condemnations, and isolation have not forced Pyongyang to denuclearize. Instead, they have made North Korea even more determined to hold on to its nuclear weapons program. And although North Korea still depends on China for economic support, Pyongyang’s expanding security relationship with Russia has made it less exclusively dependent on Beijing than in the past. If a crisis involving North Korea were to break out, China fears that it could be marginalized as conflict spirals out of control.

For nearly eight decades, Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang has leaned on historical ties, symbolic friendship, and informal coordination. But Pyongyang’s unpredictability has made such an approach inadequate. China’s new strategy, symbolized by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to North Korea in June, aims to draw Pyongyang back into its orbit and make the bilateral relationship more stable and manageable. Beijing does not want North Korea—one of the world’s few remaining communist states and a potential showcase for how China can effectively manage its relationships with allies—to fail. Nor does Beijing want to abandon its push for long-term denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula. But it realizes that it needs better ways to avoid surprises from Pyongyang, which could be destabilizing for China or trigger expanded military deployments by Japan, South Korea, and the United States.

Beijing is working to establish structured high-level communication channels so it can receive earlier warnings about potential North Korean provocations, have greater opportunities to intervene before a crisis escalates, and improve its ability to predict North Korean behavior. It is also shifting its approach from treating denuclearization as a precondition for engagement with Pyongyang to reducing risks that might lead to conflicts. With global uncertainty on the rise, China hopes that closer contact and clearer communication with North Korea can serve its most important goal—keeping its immediate neighborhood calm.

SETTING BOUNDARIES

Although China and North Korea share a border and are both communist states, their relationship has fluctuated over the nearly eight decades since the two countries were founded. China’s connection with North Korea has traditionally relied on diplomatic friendship, shared revolutionary memories, and the personal networks of elder leaders. During the Korean War, for example, the two countries drew close. But at other times, tensions have pushed them apart. After Kim Jong Un became North Korea’s leader, in late 2011, the country’s relations with China plummeted because of disagreements over Pyongyang’s actions, including Kim’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the arrest and execution of Kim’s uncle.

Beijing’s frustration with Pyongyang reached new heights in 2017, when North Korea conducted a nuclear test and many missile tests that revealed that it had mastered hydrogen bomb technology and was rapidly improving its nuclear capabilities. The test not only flew in the face of China’s stated opposition to North Korean nuclearization but was also politically embarrassing for Beijing: it occurred while China was hosting a summit for BRICS leaders. That year, China voted for five UN Security Council resolutions to impose crippling sanctions on North Korea and tighten monitoring requirements. China’s concern about a potential escalation of conflict between North Korea and the United States even led Beijing to invite U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford to China for discussions about the North Korean nuclear program and regional security.

Soon after, when a U.S.–North Korean rapprochement appeared possible, China changed course. In early 2018, after U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim started discussing a potential summit, China worried about being excluded from discussions about how to manage tensions on the Korean Peninsula. In the run-up to Kim’s meeting with Trump, which ultimately took place in Singapore in June 2018, the North Korean leader wanted to consult Xi about his experiences dealing with the U.S. leader. Beijing quickly extended an invitation for Kim to visit. Kim went to China in March and again in May and June of that same year. After Xi returned the favor and visited North Korea in the summer of 2019, border trade flourished and bilateral ties recovered.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, in the beginning of 2020, North Korea closed its border and suspended all passenger and freight train services and flights to China. The abrupt termination of the main channels of connections and contact left the Chinese–North Korean relationship in a shambles as trade ground to a halt and economic ties were mostly cut off. At the same time, North Korea drew closer to Russia, leaving China again worried about being the odd man out.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LEVERAGE

Today, China remains economically irreplaceable to North Korea. China is the source of over 70 percent of North Korea’s total foreign trade, approximately 60 percent of its food, and 75 percent of its consumer goods. China annually supplies North Korea with approximately 520,000 tons of petroleum and between 500,000 and 800,000 tons of grain and fertilizer (all within UN exemption limits). This is a foundational arrangement for sustaining North Korean livelihoods and stabilizing China’s northeastern border.

In the past few years, however, Russia has drastically increased its support to North Korea. Following the signing of the North Korean–Russian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, in June 2024, Moscow has provided security guarantees, military technology, energy supplies, labor export markets, and sanctions evasion support to Pyongyang. North Korea, in turn, has sent ammunition and soldiers to fight for Russia in its war in Ukraine.

Russia’s closer relationship with North Korea relieves some of China’s obligation to deliver economic aid and security guarantees to its northeastern neighbor. But it has also given North Korea greater bargaining power and changed its relationship with China. Previously, China was North Korea’s sole provider; now, it is merely the largest among multiple pillars of support. North Korea’s external strategy has evolved from one in which it leaned on China to balance pressure from the United States to a three-pronged arrangement in which it uses China to stabilize its economy, Russia to supplement its security, and U.S. pressure to justify its nuclear program. By simultaneously strengthening ties with China and Russia while maintaining its nuclear deterrent against the United States, North Korea has made clear its desire to replicate the Cold War–era pattern of maneuvering between China and the Soviet Union, which allows it to maximize the benefits it can receive.

For Beijing, the biggest risk of closer North Korean–Russian cooperation is that it provides an excellent pretext for Japan, South Korea, and the United States to accelerate the integration of their bloc. If North Korea and Russia continue to work closely on nuclear weapons, Japan and South Korea will use the North Korean threat to justify boosting their alliances with the United States. They could push for more trilateral intelligence sharing, joint military exercises, and weapons integration. This will ultimately create an institutionalized military deterrence alliance directed not only at North Korea but also at China, which will impose pressure on China from multiple fronts and exacerbate military tensions around flash points such as the Taiwan Strait.

Moreover, the great-power competition between China and the United States increases the chances that frictions with Pyongyang could escalate into direct U.S.-Chinese confrontation. The Korean Peninsula is an integral component of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, its alliance arrangement, and its efforts at regional deterrence. China’s priority is to avoid unnecessary military conflict with the United States, but North Korea’s continued nuclear and missile provocations, its deepening military cooperation with Russia, and its growing unpredictability risk dragging China into a crisis. Beijing’s wish to avoid instability in the Korean Peninsula reflects its desire to stabilize its relations with the United States and avoid any potential for escalation that could lead to direct conflict.

TALKING IT OUT

China can no longer rely on historical sentiment, personal friendships between leaders, and ad hoc diplomatic coordination to maintain its influence over an increasingly unpredictable, confident, and assertive North Korea. Rather, Beijing needs a way of managing its relationship with Pyongyang that is more stable, is built on consistent and normal interactions, and enables China to set enforceable conditions on the aid it provides. In other words, China needs an institutionally driven approach—one that puts greater weight on formal cooperation mechanisms and communication channels.

China is focused on establishing more emergency lines to connect leaders, expanding regular diplomatic and security consultation, and improving official notification mechanisms for border incidents and missile tests. Such efforts have already started. In the past four months, China’s foreign minister and the head of its top political advisory body met with Kim in Pyongyang, and North Korea’s premier visited China and met with Xi. Beijing further hopes to include North Korea in multilateral platforms such as the Greater Tumen Initiative, an intergovernmental economic cooperation framework for Northeast Asia, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and to develop regional dialogue mechanisms under China’s leadership in which North Korea can participate.

China still does not welcome a nuclear North Korea and does not believe its nuclear status should be cost free. But Beijing increasingly realizes that immediate denuclearization, or a clearly defined step-by-step road map to denuclearization, is not feasible. A nuclear North Korea is hardly ideal, but pressuring an unpredictable Pyongyang in ways that could lead to outright conflict is far worse. Crisis prevention and the need for stability are now China’s top priorities on the Korean Peninsula.

Beijing can also leverage North Korea’s economic dependence on China to push for specific acts of restraint from Pyongyang, such as refraining from provocative actions that could trigger expanded military deployments by Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Economic support is not just a price China has to pay to maintain North Korean stability; it is also a practical tool to shape Pyongyang’s actions and prevent Beijing’s own marginalization in the region. China can link humanitarian assistance, openness to border trade, energy supplies, and the provision of infrastructure to North Korea’s willingness to restrain its military threats. Only by conditioning incremental cooperation on tangible evidence that North Korea is effectively lowering the risks of conflict can China convert its economic advantages into substantive regional influence.

The high-level meeting in Pyongyang in June was the first step toward realizing this strategy. Chinese–North Korean relations will have to follow a new logic: if North Korea desires broader cooperation with Beijing, it has to meet China’s requirements on border stability, crisis communications, and military restraint. In return, China is willing to provide greater economic support, expand trade and investment, assist with infrastructure development, and offer international political backing, especially because it wants to see a stable and economically viable North Korea that neither poses a security threat to China nor becomes a pawn in great-power competition. With a changed North Korea, emotional ties among fellow travelers can no longer sustain regional stability. Beijing is counting on the possibility that more connections and clearer boundaries can transform its influence over Pyongyang into effective crisis management tools.

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