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China center stage north korea talks { August 28 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/international/asia/28CND-CHIN.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/international/asia/28CND-CHIN.html
August 28, 2003
Turnaround by China: Center Stage at Talks on North Korea
By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING, Aug. 28 — Whether or not the six nations gathered in Beijing this week agree on how to stop the North Korean nuclear program, the talks here seem likely to produce at least one breakthrough: the emergence of China as a more assertive diplomatic power.
China cajoled and badgered the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan and Russia to jointly discuss how to resolve the Korean crisis. Beijing is also taking the lead in pressing participants to sign a communiqué that could serve as the basis for a longer-term search for a peaceful solution, diplomats and analysts said.
Such initiatives are oddly foreign to China. Although it has the world's largest population and its fastest growing economy, it has generally abstained or carped from the sidelines on the most pressing issues of the day, most recently the Iraq war. For more than a decade it dismissed American-North Korean tensions as a relic of the cold war that the two countries should resolve on their own.
Beijing's decision to broker the nuclear talks reflects alarm at the top ranks of the Communist Party that the North Korean problem could spiral out of control, with North Korea and the United Stated locked in polar positions. Analysts said China decided that it was uniquely positioned to make a difference because of longstanding ties with North Korea, a neighbor and onetime political and military ally, and its improving relationship with the Bush administration.
Yet its assertiveness may also reflect a new sense of engagement with the world that offers some parallels to the emergence of the United States as a dominant power nearly a century ago, analysts say.
"China is starting to act like a big power, with interests it has to defend even outside its borders," said Yan Xuetong, an influential foreign policy expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "I expect these talks to be remembered as an important milestone in history for that reason."
Under Hu Jintao, president and Communist Party general secretary, China has begun to cast off faded party rituals that made it look like an odd duck on the world stage. Mr. Hu canceled the elaborate ceremonial sendoffs for top leaders traveling abroad and ended the leadership's tradition of retreating en masse to the beaches of Beidaihe in the summer, treating them as outdated trappings of a more insular era.
In June Mr. Hu became the first Chinese leader to attend a meeting of the Group of Eight, the organization of industrialized nations. His immediate predecessor, Jiang Zemin, had declined invitations to attend, and China often criticized the group as antagonistic to poor countries.
China's prominent role in the Korea talks is partly possible because it enjoys a much closer relationship with the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. China offered America help in suppressing terrorism in Central Asia — a longstanding Chinese concern because it controls the restive Muslim region of Xinjiang. The Bush administration dropped its early focus on China as a potential adversary as it became engaged in fighting terrorism globally.
Also in the past two years China has achieved two ambitions — joining the World Trade Organization and winning the rights to host the Olympics, in 2008 — that it long pursued as a form of recognition by the developed world.
"China's new leadership has clearly shown its desire to play a bigger role in the world," said Chung Chong-Wook, a former South Korean national security adviser who help manage an earlier round of negotiations to end North Korea's nuclear program. "You get the sense that they are far more confident than they were before."
Even if the nuclear talks conclude successfully, possibly boosting China's prowess, it appears highly unlikely that China could — or would want to try — to match American influence globally. It does not have a mobile military that could project force far beyond its borders and its core interests are still regional and territorial, including the ever delicate question of Taiwan.
Moreover, China is still recovering from the embarrassment it caused itself by its initial mismanagement of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Its cover-up of the sometimes fatal infectious disease in its early stages highlighted the fact that China's political system is still closed and reflexively wary of the outside world.
Still, the North Korea crisis may have brought and end to China's complacent foreign policy. Chinese analysts say Beijing in the spring began accepting American intelligence that North Korea had already developed one or two atomic bombs. Chinese officials also worried that the Bush administration, emboldened by a military victory in Iraq, was weighing the use of force on the Korean Peninsula, where China was dragged into war 50 years ago.
"The situation became an urgent crisis that the top leadership decided to handle personally," said Mr. Shi Yinhong, a foreign policy expert at People's University in Beijing.
China is doing much more than providing conference rooms to negotiators. Wang Yi, a vice foreign minister who is China's representative at the talks, took the unusual step of publicly stating China's negotiating position at the start of the talks. Mr. Wang portrayed China as an honest broker occupying the middle ground between the two main antagonists, the only player whose sole focus was to bring about resolution.
China also departed from its standard protocol of secrecy and opened its doors to the outside news media, inviting the press to photograph meetings and banquets. It opened a press center and invited the six participating nations to discuss the talks there.
China clearly hopes the media strategy will highlight its own role as a big power while also putting extra pressure on the United States and North Korea to find common ground, lest they be singled out for rejecting a peaceful settlement.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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