China-North Korea Relations: Past, Present, and Future

This paper looks explicitly at the question of North Korean collapse, framing the problem not in the normal terms -- crisis preparation, contingency planning, and the need to coordinate with Beijing about possible futures – but instead historically. North Korea has collapsed before, and there are specific lessons we can take away today from re-examining China’s response to North Korean collapse in the autumn of 1950, a period which Ra Jong-yil reminds us still requires “some afterthought”. I want to go beyond the normal questions about “why China intervened in the Korean War” and look at some new data I unearthed from the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive about how China responded to the pressure of large refugee inflow and the question in particular of a North Korean government in exile in the PRC. The paper concludes with a consideration of China's relatively smooth and confident preparations for dealing with flooding disasters in the extreme northeast of the DPRK, and what this might portend for conflict scenarios.