Businessweek article on Foxconn/Hon Hai: "The Man Who Makes Your iPhone"

Hmm...

Well, that's a big question.

I deal with fairly senior people in the Party a lot, so I'll give you the unofficial Party position.

You know that embarrassing brother/nephew/cousin? The one who you know you should love, because he's your brother/nephew/cousin, but he really stretches your patience. It used to be that he was just a bit off the wall, but now he's addicted to heroin and that's caused a series of psychotic episodes, and you always dread family events, because he'll turn up off his head, throw up on the cake, swear at your aunt, have a fight with your uncle, and get arrested? (Maybe that's just my family....) That's what China thinks of North Korea. China's tried everything - accommodating the problems, tough love, interventions, withdrawing support, everything - but nothing will sort out this embarrassing brother. What makes things worse in this case is that, if you try the wrong thing, the brother/nephew/cousin will turn up to the next family event with a machine gun and kill everyone.

North Korea really stretches China's patience, but publicly China remains allied to NK. This is because NK sees China as its only friend, and China fears that, if it openly abandons NK, the NK leadership will go completely nuts (well, more completely nuts than it already is).

Also, China can't afford to let NK collapse: if it does, both China and SK will have to deal with serious refugee crises. And these aren't normal refugees: these are messed-up people. The ones who make it over the border to China at the moment often turn to crime, not because they're bad people, but because they can't function: they don't understand how a shop works, or how to cross the road, or how to make a phone call, or how to get a job, because they've never come across these things before. At the same time that they're coping with all these new things, they're trying to deal with the mind-melting concept that everything they've ever been told is a lie. North Koreans get told that they live in the richest, happiest country on earth, and that they live under a benevolent leader who protects them from the awfulness outside their borders. And then they get across the river and discover that China has well-fed people, and nice food, and electricity, and heating, and cars, and open(ish) communication with the rest of the world: their entire concept of how the world is just collapses. (There's a very good documentary about how North Korean defectors learn to cope with this at a special school in the South: see below: )

So, China thinks that the best thing it can do is to pretend to like NK, and try to bring the new leadership - and the rest of the country - gradually into the real world. But it doesn't have any illusions that it will manage to do this: it just thinks it has to keep trying.

As for the other half of your question, the current Chinese leadership - and the likely leadership after October - likes SK, and has been happy to deal with the SK government over the last few years whichever SK party is in power. There's a lot of SK investment in China, and an increasing amount of Chinese investment in SK, and lots of travel between the two countries by ordinary people. The current free-trade talks between China, SK and Japan show how the relationship is blossoming.

China's biggest concern about SK is a collapse of NK and subsequent reunification. When Germany reunified, it created serious financial problems for West Germany. And East Germany was a developed country with a well-educated populace that was just a bit poorer that West Germany: an NK-SK reunification would be in a different league, with a starving, brainwashed, dirt-poor population trying to integrate into a rich, modern, liberal country. Most North Koreans are unemployable by SK (or global) standards, and they'd basically be a massive dead weight on the SK economy. And that's before you get on to the incredibly expensive process of building NK an education system, and infrastructure, and a functioning agriculture sector, and the mechanisms for civil society, and everything else that it needs. China might occasionally rattle its sabres and make empty threats about protecting NK and not wanting a US ally on its border, but in reality, China just wants to keep NK afloat in order to kick the inevitable disaster further down the road. And when the NK collapse or a war or whatever does happen, China will go all out to assist SK with everything it needs to try to keep the NK population docile, reasonably happy, and within the NK borders.

 

Great post! It took a while to write and describe, so thanks for the education.

 

You're very welcome. Thanks for thanking me: it's nice to be appreciated.

 

+1 on that hkmb ! Very insightful. While I was in Seoul last year I took a tour to the DMZ. Just being that close to the DPR is like being in the twilight zone.

 

hkmb