Annals of weird diplomacy
North Korea’s leader pretends not to be visiting his patrons
IN A musty corner of China’s diplomatic world, it seems, communist brethren are permitted to move about unseen. Even as North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il, was touring Chinese port cities on his first known foreign trip in four years, Chinese officials were refusing to confirm that he was even in the country. Mr Kim likes to travel furtively and China grudgingly humours him.
But Mr Kim’s train, say South Korea’s media, did chug over the border into the Chinese city of Dandong on May 3rd and from there headed to the nearby port of Dalian. He then proceeded to the northern city of Tianjin and thence to Beijing for meetings with Chinese leaders. Mr Kim was expected to ask for more food and aid for his blighted, benighted country. China wants him in return to agree to re-enter negotiations with itself, America, South Korea, Japan and Russia about dismantling his nuclear programmes.
China dearly wishes Mr Kim would behave normally. If there is one country where it would like to promote a “China model” of development (see article), it is North Korea. But efforts to prod its neighbour into adopting Chinese-style reforms are reminiscent of the way America tries to nudge China onto a more liberal path. The attempts are guarded by an anticipation of failure.
On Mr Kim’s previous trip abroad in 2006 (no word of which was officially announced until he had gone home), he went to the southern city of Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong and the cradle of China’s economic reforms. Wen Wei Po, a newspaper in Hong Kong closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, quoted an unnamed observer as saying Mr Kim might have made the trip because the trendsetting region had the kind of experience that North Korea could “draw inspiration from”. How wrong can you be?
This time China Daily, a government-controlled newspaper in Beijing (oddly quoting Yonhap, a South Korean news agency), noted that Dalian, Mr Kim’s first stop, was “a northeast port city known as a model of market reforms”. It is indeed a world apart from anything Mr Kim will have seen in his own country: vibrant, prosperous and replete with high-tech factories, many of them built with the help of foreign investment. But if Mr Kim dreams of replicating Dalian’s experience at home, he shows no sign of understanding how to begin.
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