hankyoreh

President Park Geun-hye speaks during the joint 2016 policy report to the president by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs

The differences in Seoul’s, Washington’s, and Beijing’s ideas on how to respond to North Korea’s recent fourth nuclear test are coming into sharper relief.

South Korea and the US’s calls for “forceful, comprehensive, and effective sanctions” are drawing an unenthusiastic response from China, while China’s idea of combining sanctions with efforts to ensure regional political stability and achieve dialogue and negotiation are failing to gain traction amid a hard-line climate in Seoul and Washington. The resulting situation is one where neither of the two key components to a response on the nuclear issue - sanctions on one hand, dialogue and negotiations on the other - is able to function. And as the ping pong game of passing the responsibility continues between the sides, the vacuum of leadership in managing the situation and finding a solution is stretching into the long term. More than seven years have passed since the six-party talks to resolve the North Korean issue were suspended in Dec. 2008.

The divide in responses from Seoul and Beijing only deepened with remarks made by President Park Geun-hye at a Jan. 22 policy report to the president by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, National Defense, and Unification, during which she suggested that the six-party talks were a fruitless framework and proposed a “five-party” approach excluding Pyongyang. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Hong Lei soon responded by saying that dialogue and negotiation were “still the basic approaches to problem resolution in the current situation on the [Korean] peninsula.” Hong also expressed “hopes that all of the countries will honor the principles and spirit of the Sep. 19 Joint Statement and resume the six-party talks quickly,” referring to a statement released in 2005. It was the rare example in South Korea-China relations of a foreign ministry spokesperson openly rebutting claims made by the other side’s President.

The attitude from Washington has been similarly fuzzy. When asked for initial comment by the Hankyoreh, the US State Department said it was “open to any dialogue aimed at North Korea’s return to credible and sincere denuclearization negotiations.”

But as the outcry over Park’s “five-party talks” remarks grew, the US ambassador to South Korea announced on Jan. 23 that the US “supports President Park’s call for a five-party meeting.” In addition to the unusual nature of the ambassador’s statement, it also came from someone farther down in the hierarchy than the State Department. A South Korean senior official also said on Jan. 24 that Park’s comments about the five-party talks had “been made without prior discussion with other countries,” including the US. In response, the Blue House and Ministry of Foreign Affairs have sought to contain the controversy over the remarks by claiming that Park was referring to “greater five-party coordination within the six-party talks framework.”

Meanwhile, Washington and Beijing continued to go back and forth publicly over “responsibility” for the North Korean nuclear issue. Just after the nuclear test earlier this month, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that China “had a particular approach that it wanted to make, and we agreed and respected to give them space to be able to implement that,” but that the approach “has not worked.” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Hua Chunying fired back that the “origins of the [Korean] peninsula’s nuclear issue do not lie with China, and the key points of the solution do not lie with China either.” The Global Times, the English-language daily under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily, went even further, citing the US’s “hostile policies” toward North Korea as one of the causes of the nuclear issue.

Perhaps a more serious sign is the lack of any public statements since the test from either US President Barack Obama or Chinese President Xi Jinping. The silence could be interpreted as signaling bafflement at the lack of any suitable solution to the escalating nuclear issue, but it also means that neither the top leader in the US nor in China has come out publicly to state a commitment to solving the problem.

Many have expressed vocal concerns about Park’s continued insistence on a Chinese role in the solution and public pressures on Beijing, including her discussion of the possible deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on the Korean Peninsula at a Jan. 13 press conference and her calls for five-party talks at the Jan. 22 policy report to the president of foreign affairs and national security agencies.

“While I can understand the President’s sense of urgency, these are typical cases of undiplomatic statements that show concern only for domestic political impact,” said one former senior official on Jan. 24.

“Not only does this kind of public pressure from the President not help in getting the Chinese government to actively cooperate in the response to the North Korean nuclear issue, but it’s also poised to become a strain on South Korea-China relations,” the former official added.

By Lee Je-hun, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]