China is heiress of a long and convulsive past. Willing imperial isolationism comes together with a consistent cost-reducing delay, colonial interference, military invasion, civil war and high doses of Mao Zedong´s thought. For that reason it got late to the worldwide hegemony's sphere. And probably because of that disparity between size and influence, almost forty years ago set out to take the necessary steps in the attempt of imposing its giant-sized weight in the worldwide sand.
However, this hegemonic offensive comes ballasted in the transition of its internal institutions, weighted by forced political support, impositions and total absence of social transparency. As a sequel, Communist Party´s undisputed state control, with new entrepreneurial clothes, was presented as the only possible capable leadership to maintain the national unit before the challenge of its convoked modernization against the clock. This option evidenced the appearances of certain credibility, at least in the meantime the globalization process kept on coming to worldwide scene. Nevertheless, it´s no longer the case.
Korean conflict´s aggressive climbing had put the Chinese foreign policy´s backyard in a complete crisis. Based in a stale exercise of realpolitik inherited of the missing Cold War, the "peripheral influence zones" of Beijing begin to missing the first-settled way. So, supported antidemocratic regimens like Burma and North Korea now show disobedience and beginning opposed directions toward future, but both outside Chinese´s old tutelage.
The first surprise came from Burma. After China´s economic support and tutelage for years, an apparently unmovable and repressive military dictatorship beginning by its own unexpected political steps to lead the country toward democratization and civil order. This amazing process immediately has acquired serious recognition and solid support from the international community… and also former Celestial Empire´s bewilderment, confronting that sudden influence´s loss in its own foreign policy´s architecture. But that´s no t the worst.
North Korea has been another disobedience recent case, but much more serious in ungovernable behavior, most of all for the geographic proximity and political nature of the subject. In its uninterrupted third edition, the Kim´s communist totalitarian dynasty model has produced country´s exhaustion. It taking it to a dangerous boiling point: an unacceptable level of menace to international community, threatening with the use of its atomic weapons and ballistic missiles.
China has pulled its ears in two very near occasions. First in a recent North-Korean continental missile´s throw. And the second occasion because an underground atomic-explosion test occurred the last February. To add insult to injury, with certain perplexity the great power confesses that almost has official contacts with its unruly pupil.
But scoldings have not reduced the bellicosity of new heir Kim Jong-un and its more aggressive circle of power. He did not rein back his utmost belligerency either at the harsh sanctions applied by the UN as a consequence of Nort-Korean´s nuclear test and missiles´s throw.
This pertinacious irreverence has brought controversial conflicts inside Chinese high ranks. Some analysts recommend to release the North Korean ballast and to back up peninsula´s. unification. But others opinions goes more far. In February, the newspaper Financial Times of China published a column under the title "China should abandon North Korea". In his own words, editor Deng Yuwen even affirm that Beijing should back up a Korean unification However, and in spite of the veiled reproaches to North Korea made by the Chinese president Xi Jinping in the cost-reducing international forum of Boao, Hainan Island: "Nobody should be allowed to put on a region and enclosure to the whole wide world in chaos for account of selfish profits", , official Chinese reactions immediately have repressed further of that kind of declarations.
However, this abrupt reaction precisely reveals that a so radical measure would shake too abruptly the arthritics parameters inside still works Chinese Communist Party and government´s rigid foreign policy, and maybe is now in a very slow forward transition, getting away from its ancient protectorate´s format.
As a consequence of this prickly unglue between both nations, prominent specialists speculate on serious consequences that a Korean peninsula´s warlike conflict would have for China. Part of these opinions refers to the danger that the conflict between the two Koreas happens in an atomic conflagration that destabilizes the region. Others forecast the consequences of a new economic rival´s presence of in the Far East, emerging of a nation united under the impetuous South Korean economy. And both expectations put as a factor of danger the geographic proximity.
But, in case of emerging a new nation reunified in Korea, would be in the middle of damaged country. The new Korea would suffer a still bigger delay than the one that stopped the vigorous German growth when it matches with the Oriental zone´s unification in the las nineties. In that case, it's very unlikely that in less than thirty or forty years a unified Korea turns into an economic serious rival for China.
On the other hand, in spite of authoritative statements in which the military strength of China to repel any aggression ("China does not have fear of being overrun or surrounded by no country", Cheng Xiaohe, Renmin´s University), is declared at the evident absence of an external capable enemy to invade her, the real fears of China´s authorities are hiddenly omitted. The true fear is another one: that a sudden an abrupt unbalance of its foreign policy would provoke consequences in its fragile internal order.
Right now attentive to the consequences of the last historic worldwide experiences, most of all the nothing tranquilizing example of the Near East´s liberating wave. With evident consequences in near Burma, Chinese mandarins have understood the unstoppable change-force that Globalization provokes on monolithic´s government structures. They know that with the economic crisis that suffers the highly developed West, its bigger goods and services´ buyer, China must change its economic format. From an export-components factory model visualized decades ago, it has to change to a more consumer profile, in an attempt of avoiding its enormous external dependence.
Is easy to foresee that a warlike crisis in Korea would abruptly unbalanced the Asiatic giant´s glassy internal order . The country would suffer an acceleration of its enormous contradictions still without solving: economic growth´s abysmal disparity between country´s Orient- West ; colonial internal conflicts in border territories, like Tibet or the Muslim Xinjian; galloping corruption in the middle of labor and social crisis, all with few practical solutions....
Because its generally low standard of living, an impatient and irritated society would seek to skip the obstacle of the unbending Communist Party´s political and legislative control. It would try to undertake a most accessible nation to mayor participative decisions. And as a consequence of its own close historic precedent, a totalitarian Party´s violence reaction would be most than probable. A chaos would drive away the ambitious possibilities of turning China into a worldwide powerful nation.
So, China is the most impatient neighbor with the irritating North Korean insubordination. But perhaps the restlessness before an unstoppable disaster is what it is harvesting right after so many decades of support and pupilage to a brutal Oriental tyranny.