Quote ="vbfg"Never going to happen.
I would bet any money that right now China is moving troops to their border with DPRK. They have a mutual defence pact with them, but the China that signed that treaty is a completely different thing to the China of today. If they're doing that at all they're doing it to:
1) A show of force to deter a first strike against DPRK.
2) A force to deal with any refugees
3) A force to deal with any contingencies
This is not going to be a second Korean War. China was playing a short game then, which was to prevent the US establishing bases on its border. China is playing a long game now, and sanctioning a war against its major economic partners isn't going to put it in any kind of position to do that. They are getting rich from that long game. Their cities are now populated by a burgeoning middle class who will lose everything when China's trade with the rest of the world falls through the floor. There are entire generations who know only double digit growth year on year. Those are the seeds of major civil unrest, and they are not going to go down that road.
All of this is under threat because of a yapping little dog that it was useful to keep in the back yard when Mao was consolidating power. It's a yapping little dog that produces billions in counterfeit Chinese currency and undermines its economy. It's a yapping little dog that has broken free of its leash but which the world continues to see as being fed raw meat by China. The only benefit of its continued existence to China is the prevention of foreign bases on its most important border. It very definitely does not want a proliferation of nuclear targets that close. Not when the actions of others determine whether the nukes are going to fly or not.
Make no mistake, China would like to stop that thing from snapping at its ankles just as much as everyone else would. An attack of any significance by DPRK against any of Japan, ROK or the US in this climate means DPRK gets whacked. If something like [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeongthis[/url happens in the current climate the DPRK gets whacked. If the DPRK gets whacked then the RoK is now the whole Korean peninsula. China cannot prevent this without getting involved, and they cannot get involved without trashing everything they've been working towards since Nixon visited a little over forty years ago and everything they planned their entire economy and mode of living around working towards for the next forty years.
What China wants is a DKRP that can be brought to heel. [url=https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=north+korea&hl=en&ll=39.53794,123.640137&spn=13.933225,19.753418&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&hnear=North+Korea&gl=uk&t=m&z=6Look at this map[/url. Look at what's 200 miles directly west of the border. See why it's the most important border?
China is not going to fsck around with this. This is 2013. It's not 1950.'"
I'll be flying to Shanghai on Sunday to start hiring people out there to work for the American company that employs me. Everything you said rings true. It's a different time. China will look after it's border, but to suggest that these few loons in Pyonyang mean more than the economic future of nearly 2 billion Chinese would be rather silly. You are correct - China has a long term plan, they have at the very least the next 10 years mapped out in great detail and a war involving the whole of Korea being turned into an irradiated wasteland probabaly isn't in it.
As far as I know China has been in talks with the US already.
