Anyone who has seen a police drama - from Dragnet to Law and Order and anything in between - has seen the "good cop, bad cop" routine. One officer antagonizes the suspect, while the other plays it cool, pretends that his partner is "out of control," and extracts the confession. Well, "good cop, bad cop" works in international politics, too, and there's no better example of that than Communist China and its third item). Sadly, even some in the Korean and Chinese democracy movements (Epoch Times: Chinese) have fallen for the routine. I remain unconvinced; there's far more reason to believe Communist China sees the nuclear test as an opportunity rather than a headache.
Prior to the nuclear test, anti-Communism was slowly gaining currency in
Washington. The Defense Department issued a report highlighting Communist China's military
buildup and geopolitical antics. Less than two months later,
Canadians David Kilgour and David Matas released a damning report on Communist organ harvesting. Communist espionage operations
were getting enough attention to inspire a Congressional investigation. Last but hardly
least, news leaked out - complete with videotape - on a horrific outrage in occupied
Tibet where Communist border guards used fleeing Tibetans for target
practice.
Then, on October 9, North Korea re-arranges part of the Earth's
surface, and the ensuing political earthquake levels all of the above.
Am
I saying Zhongnanhai knew what was coming before the twenty-minute heads-up from
Pyongyang? Not necessarily. The cadres are smart enough to ensure "plausible
deniability" - especially in the modern media environment where they can't
prevent their invasion plans for Taiwan from hitting the front page of the Epoch
Times. More to the point, Communist China didn't need to know
the exact timeline of the NK nuclear program to use it as a card against the
United States.
However, given the whispers that the test "embarrassed"
the Chinese Communist Part in the middle of its latest plenum, it should be
noted that the timeline was in fact quite fortuitous for a regime eager to keep
its cold-blooded Tibet murder off the political radar. Moreover, if one is prone
to track specific timelines, the fact that North Korea's earlier missile test
came one day after Mr. Kilgour's announcement of what was in his and Mr. Mata's
report and two days before the report's release cannot escape one's
attention.
In reality, what matters here is not the exact timing of North
Korea's tests. Rather, it's the events that have occurred after it. While the
United Nations Security Council has spoken, it has hardly acted. In fact, only
Japan has taken concrete action directly resulting from the test. The United
States, by contrast, has merely been building upon its already active (and
praiseworthy) program to interdict North Korean shipping - better known as the
Proliferation Security Initiative. Communist China, by contrast, hasn't lifted a
finger (second item).
The reason for this is
simple: Communist China does not have the same interests as the democratic
world. The free world wants to prevent North Korea from harassing its neighbors
and arming terrorists with nuclear weaponry. Communist China, by contrast, is
already doing both of these things, so having Kim Jong-il do them on
its behalf allows it to accomplish its objectives without any
consequences.
So what can we expect from Communist China? We can expect
more of the same: more boilerplate rhetoric, more visits to Pyongyang, more
messages from Kim Jong-il through Beijing, and more stories about how much the
cadres want nothing to do with the Stalinist regime's antics, written
by people who really should know better.
In the long term, the democratic
world is playing into Communist China's hands. Already, the "academic community"
in Beijing is dropping hints that northern Korea was once "Chinese" territory
(third item); similar hints were dropped
regarding Tibet before the Communists removed it from the fraternity of
independent nations. For a regime using radical nationalism to distract the
attention of ordinary Chinese from rampant corruption, constant land seizures,
and nearly six decades of brutality, annexing northern Korea - with the
requisite payoffs to Kim Jong-il and his cronies - is a lot easier than taking
on Taiwan, especially if the regime has managed to convince the rest of the
world that Kim et al are dangerous loners.
As Kevin Spacey's
character from The Usual Suspects put it: "The greatest trick the devil
ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist" - and just like Kaiser
Soze, Communist China is convincing the world the devil is actually someone
else. Kim Jong-il's regime lives or dies only on Communist China's sufferance.
It is in Beijing, not Pyongyang, where the epicenter of evil resides, and it
must be rooted out. The free world will never be secure until China is free.
Posted by D.J. McGuire on October 24, 2006 in International Affairs