We constantly made the mistake in the Cold War of assuming that the Soviet Union controlled everything in China, North Korea, or Vietnam; it's clearly been shown by history that they didn't.
The North Koreans are pretty independent; the Chinese help them to desperately avert the regime collapsing and having millions of refugees come across the border.
Without China, NK would starve.
3 posted on Tue May 01 2012 08:24:20 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Eric in the Ozarks: “Very little happens in NK without the PRC’s approval.”
If you changed that to “without Chinese acquiescence” I could agree, but it would be wrong to think that North Korea is micromanaged or even “macromanaged” out of Beijing. It's always hard to tell for sure what's happening in any pariah state, let alone something as extreme as North Korea, but Chinese leaders are claiming to be surprised by North Korea's missile provocations. If that really is true, it's likely Kim Jong Un’s way of making clear to both the Chinese and to his own military leaders that he doesn't take orders from China.
Let's never forget that the Kim dynasty, over the years, has learned that the way to survive is to defy even Stalin and Mao, let along their less-vicious and more-pragmatic successors, ignoring their offers of outside help in order to preserve North Korean independence and ability to say “no” to outsiders.
A further complication is that trying to make sense of North Korea requires understanding it in the category of an ancient Asian kingdom, not any modern category of dictatorship. It's really a dynasty supported by the military, much like Asian kingdoms had been for thousands of years before extensive contact with the West, while using the external trappings of Communism. It's quite possible that the Kim dynasty and the founders of North Korea actually believed in Communism, but regardless of what they believed ideologically, Communism turned into a very useful way for the Kim dynasty to assert its own control without having to deal with ancient Confucian scholarship traditions, the landed or bureaucratic aristocracy of the yangban class, or the “foreign influence” of Christianity which in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, competed with Communism as the major ideology animating the anti-Japanese nationalist elements in both northern and southern Korea.
China's tolerance presumably has limits, but the Kim dynasty has a self-interested motive in not being viewed by its military as being tributary vassals of the current Chinese government — not the least being that China has its own leadership problems at the moment. This is a country that has inherited thousands of years of xenophobic hatred of outsiders, and while China is the one exception to that rule — there are centuries of history between China (especially the Manchu Dynasty) and Korea — being viewed as independent and self-sufficient is not a mere overlay of ideology for North Koreans.
I think a good case could be made that independence and self-sufficiency are more important to the ruling class in North Korea than Communism was for the ruling classes of the old Soviet Union or China even in their Stalinist and Maoist heydays, and being seen as not dependent on outside help may very well be more important to those who have real power in North Korea than core American values of democracy are to those involved in American government.
How can China expect to run a country like that if it takes over? I don't know the answer. Mao and Stalin thought the Kim dynasty was the answer but it's become clear that the Kim dynasty wants to run itself in its own way. Xenophobia is a Korean reality that has existed for thousands of years, and without access to the outside world, most North Koreans don't know any different way of viewing things.