Tigers in the Haze: Chinese Troops on the Border with North Korea in the “April Crisis”

While China is frequently assumed to have a number of “levers” it could use to control North Korea, in fact, its policies across the board—from security to economics—are much more limited. An examination of actions in March and April 2017, when China was confronted with the destabilizing prospect of unilateral U.S. military action against North Korea, and apparently responded by taking more vigorous steps with Pyongyang, provides some useful insight. In addition to describing personal experience along the border in April 2017, this article sifts, weighs, and contextualizes assertions about the posture and readiness of Chinese troops along the Sino-Korean border during the crisis period. The conventional wisdom outside of the PRC today seems to assume that mobilizing troops near the border signals to North Korea that China is ready to either roll in or to block the flow of refugees into China. Too often, analysis which highlights assertions of Chinese mobilization in the border region ignore the signals already being sent by the Chinese military press (as opposed to Chinese foreign affairs periodicals) with respect to North Korea, and the documentation of open-source data on related Chinese military drills. Finally, if China was, in fact, using troop movements to intimidate North Korea, how would we know a) that troop movements were in fact happening and b) that China intended them to impress DPRK?