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The Peninsula and Perestroika
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17538 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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7 / 1990 |
2,058 Words |
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Allen S. Whiting
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Four decades ago South Korea lay ravaged from a war started by North Korea, prolonged for nearly three years by China, and backed by the Soviet Union. Had Beijing not massively intervened, the Korean peninsula would have been united under UN auspices in December 1950.
Forty years later, South Korea's $3 billion trade with China approximates China's trade with the Soviet Union. Seoul hosts a Soviet consular trade office, while major South Korean corporations search for investment opportunities in Siberia.
There is still no peace treaty; only an armistice defines relations between North and South Korea. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) still separates the heaviest concentration of military forces in the world.
Events in Eastern Europe have gone so far so fast as to make movement in Asia seem positively glacial. Nevertheless, recent developments in the Seoul-Beijing-Moscow-Pyongyang quadrilateral carry far-reaching implications for this long-standing "hot spot" where three nuclear powers are pledged to defend one or the other side.
So far as relations with the two communist giants are concerned, these developments add up to a ringing success for South Korea's "nordpolitik" first announced in 1973 but pursued more vigorously following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. The original hope was that mutual economic interests could improve political relations with North Korea's allies who might then use their influence to improve North-South relations. At the least Moscow and Beijing could reduce Pyongyang's paranoia and, more ideally, constrain its belligerent behavior.
As long as Sino-Soviet confrontation offered North Korea the opportunity to play its allies off against one another in their competition for influence, nordpolitik had little impact on Pyongyang by way of Moscow and Beijing. With the Sino-Soviet summit of May 1989, however, Seoul's strategy took on greater promise with the reduction in Pyongyang's leverage. But then the political earthquake that shook communist regimes in Eastern Europe reverberated in East Asia, Prompting hardliners in Beijing and Pyongyang to consult, to the possible disadvantage of Seoul.
Seoul saw the economic logic in a China link from the very start of nordpolitik, but it took Deng Xiaoping's "open door" policy to make South Korean trade and investment possible. A dearth of natural resources permits Chinese coal, cotton, corn, and crude oil to balance off against South Korean manufactures, such as electrical products, fertilizer, and textiles. China's market potential is an attractive offset against threatened protectionism in the United States and Japan, while South Korean capital can find better returns from cheap labor on the mainland compared with rapidly rising wages back home.
The Yellow Sea provides ready access for efficient transportation between the Korean peninsula and Chinese ports. During the past decade, however, virtually all this trade passed through third parties, mainly Hong Kong, out of Beijing's deference to Pyongyang's sensibilities. Even now direct trade usually is carried by third country flagged vessels. Political inhibition may also explain Beijing's sudden cancellation of a major South Korean business delegation that was
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