NORTH KOREA: China's relative inexperience in proactive foreign policy appears to be keeping Beijing from playing a bigger role in the Korean stand-off, writes John Ruwitch in Beijing.
Some say the nuclear impasse now blighting the Korean peninsula presents China, North Korea's best friend and neighbour, with a golden opportunity to play a pivotal role in resolving the tension and boost its international image.
But in the three months since US officials said that Pyongyang had admitted to a secret nuclear weapons programme, Beijing appears to have done little more than state and restate its preference for Washington and Pyongyang to thrash out a resolution.
Yesterday Chinese President Jiang Zemin told President Bush that he disagreed with North Korea's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But China's otherwise passive approach has some asking why, with its long-standing and unique ties to its feisty Communist brother, and a strong desire to build a reputation as a major player on the world stage, Beijing isn't doing more.
The limitations of China's relations with North Korea, its fear of instability and its relative inexperience in proactive foreign policy all appear to have kept China from playing a bigger role in the crisis.
Analysts say that China simply does not have the clout with Pyongyang that many outsiders believe it has, even though the two nations have been friends since long before they spilled blood together on the battlefields of the 1950-53 Korean War.
"I think it's a mixture of lack of leverage and national interests," said Mr Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China in Hong Kong.
"China's room for manoeuvre is maybe narrower than we think."
North Korea has never been under Beijing's thumb, analysts say, even during the Korean War. And, lately, it is believed that North Korea may even have drawn closer to Russia, with which it has had more contact in recent years.
China is the biggest source of food and fuel that has kept North Korea going after a series of natural disasters in the mid-1990s, and analysts agree that Beijing would not consider pulling back on that aid, or threatening to suspend it.
China's fixation on stability, they say, is the prime concern. Any more volatility in the region could affect growth. Instability in North Korea could lead to hundreds of thousands of refugees coming across the border, with inevitable domestic consequences.
"China doesn't want to rock the boat with its neighbour as there are too many interests at stake," said one diplomat.
Another Beijing-based Western diplomat said that with North Korea cornered by the international community, China's adoption of a passive stand was keeping the North from feeling totally isolated.
"They need someone to depend on and maybe it's China," he said.
"If China pressures North Korea, China might meet with some very, very unhappy response from North Korea and it could make bilateral relations worse. North Korea might then cut itself off from the international community and China," he added.
Diplomatic sources said South Korea had asked China to send a senior envoy to Pyongyang to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il face-to-face to seek a resolution to the problem.
But China declined, reiterating its position that it was up to Pyongyang and Washington to resolve the problem.
Mr Tim Savage, a fellow at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, said instability - possibly ending in the collapse of the North Korean regime - was a nightmare for China.
"A collapse of North Korea could unleash hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring across the border with China. It could result in American troops much closer to Chinese borders than they are now," he said.
"It leaves China with the uncertainty of its ability to influence events on the Korean peninsula in the future." - (Reuters)