The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (39 page)

Like so much else that happens on the Korean peninsula, the first crack in the political firewall between Beijing and Seoul had emerged from a violent incident—the hijacking in May 1983 of a Chinese airliner by six Chinese, who shot and wounded two crew members and forced the pilot to fly to South Korea. China sent a thirty-three-member official delegation to Seoul, where the two nations smoothly negotiated a deal for the return of the plane, its passengers, and its crew.

North Korea was quick to protest to China about this first official contact between Beijing and the Seoul government. Chinese officials responded that this was a special case and renewed the pledge that they would not depart from “China’s firm stance” against ties with the South.

In March 1985, in another violent incident, two mutinous seamen opened fire with AK-47s aboard a Chinese navy torpedo boat in the Yellow
Sea, killing the captain and five other crewmen. As the vessel ran out of fuel and drifted helplessly at sea, a South Korean fishing boat towed it to a nearby South Korean port. China sent three warships steaming into Korean territorial waters in search of the missing torpedo boat, and ROK air, naval, and coast guard forces were mobilized. In an atmosphere of impending crisis, Seoul CIA station chief James Delaney and Ambassador Richard Walker urgently communicated with Beijing to urge caution. The Chinese warships backed off, and the United States helped arrange the Sino-ROK negotiations that returned the ship and its crew to China in exchange for Beijing’s apology for “inadvertently” entering Korean waters.

The amicable settlement of these emergencies coincided with one of the dips in Sino–North Korean relations as Kim Il Sung’s trips to Moscow in 1984 and 1986 led to warming Soviet security ties and large new shipments of Soviet weapons. Chinese military officials were unhappy with Kim’s agreeing to Soviet air force overflights of North Korean territory and Soviet navy visits to North Korean ports, all on the rim of China.

According to the account of a former Chinese official, a very senior North Korean military official, probably Defense Minister O Jin U, sought to match the Soviet weaponry with Chinese weaponry in the mid-1980s, making extensive requests for ships, planes, and other major weapons during an unpublicized trip to Beijing. After a study by the Defense Ministry of the requirements and costs, Deng rejected the entire request and directed his aides to supply nothing. The North Korean minister left for home, furious about the denial of military aid.

While unofficial contacts with South Korea continued to develop—most prominently, the participation of several hundred Chinese athletes in the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul—the greatest shifts developed after the advent of President Roh Tae Woo. As noted previously, during his campaign for the presidency in 1987, Roh had pledged to “cross the Yellow Sea” to China during his term, and he began working on China relations immediately on taking office. Only eight days after his inauguration, he invited to the Blue House an old friend, a Chinese-born medical doctor who had lived three decades in Korea, and authorized him to go to China as an unofficial emissary to pave the way for diplomatic relations. This was the first of a large number of unofficial approaches by Korean businessmen and others authorized by Roh to make the case for full-scale ties. A number of influential Chinese, including Deng’s daughter and his handicapped son, visited Seoul as guests of Korean industrialists. “We were sure they would send back their impressions to Deng and higher-ups without any filter,” said a senior aide to Roh. To keep his hand in developments, Roh had his brother-in-law play an active role in the behind-the-scenes contacts.

While the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries were moving toward political ties with South Korea in the wake of the Seoul Olympics,
China held back, insisting on the clear-cut separation of politics from economics. Roh, however, continued to signal his interest to Beijing in every way possible. When the Chinese government’s June 1989 suppression of prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square created widespread revulsion and endangered China’s hosting of the 1990 Asian Games, Roh lobbied Asian sports leaders not to penalize China. He also urged President George Bush and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, among other world leaders, to restrain their reactions to the Tiananmen crackdown, and he made sure that Beijing leaders knew of his efforts.

In the spring of 1990, China finally activated a channel for unofficial contacts aimed at eventual diplomatic relations with Seoul. The initial discussions, resembling the meetings of go-betweens exploring a marriage to unite two Asian families, involved Lee Sun Sok, president of the Sunkyung corporation in Seoul, whose board chairman’s son had married Roh Tae Woo’s daughter, and a Chinese Army colonel who was the son-in-law of Li Xiannian, a prominent member of the Chinese leadership. A subsequent series of meetings between the Korean businessman and high-ranking Chinese trade officials led to the establishment of semiofficial trade offices with consular functions in the two capitals at the end of 1990. The South Korean “trade representative” in the Chinese capital was not a businessman or economic official but in fact a veteran and senior diplomat, Ambassador Roh Jae Won (no relation to the president), who assumed a key role in the quasi-diplomatic negotiations with China.

The year 1991 was crucial in the revision of Chinese policy. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s travels in southern China, the Beijing regime regained the confidence and momentum it had briefly lost in the bloody tumult of Tiananmen Square two years earlier. Once more it attuned its diplomacy to the external sources of capital, markets, and technology for rapid economic growth, which meant the capitalistic nations of North America, Western Europe—and South Korea, just across the Yellow Sea. Unproductive ideological commitments, such as that to North Korea, slipped down on the priority list.

In May 1991, during Premier Li Peng’s official visit to Pyongyang, China changed its basic trade policy with Pyongyang from concessional and barter exchanges to trade based on convertible currency at international prices, change implemented over a two-year period. Later that year, Seoul’s new status as a full member of the world body provided a venue and a rationale for upgrading Sino–South Korean ties. Immediately after the South’s UN entry in September 1991, Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen met for the first time with his South Korean counterpart, in a UN conference room in New York. Although Qian was noncommittal about early normalization of bilateral relations, the meeting itself was unprecedented, and a landmark.

On November 21, when he traveled in Seoul on the occasion of the third general meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Coordination organization, Foreign Minister Qian became the first Chinese official to meet Roh Tae Woo. Roh, who had prepared extensively for the session, observed that the Korean relationship with China “had a 5,000 year history, going back to ancient days, of good neighbors closer to each other than any other country,” and that the period of severed relations since World War II was without precedent and cause for shame. He reminded Qian that in the sixteenth century Korea refused to permit the Japan warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi to use Korean territory to stage an attack on the Chinese Ming dynasty—after which the Japanese invaded Korea and laid waste to the peninsula.

Roh assured his visitor that “we fully understand China’s loyal relationship with North Korea that was forged through the Korean War.” Nonetheless, he went on, “I believe that China, [South] Korea and North Korea can build a relationship without betraying that loyalty. As I have stated several times, we are not thinking, not even in dreams, of a German style unification by absorption, which North Korea is worried about. What we want to do with North Koreans, who are of the same nation, is to abandon hostility and restore confidence and to establish a cooperative relationship. It is not our position to dominate them based on our economic power.”

Qian responded by addressing the long historical relationship of Korea and China and, invoking a common enemy, spoke of their “similar experiences of historic sufferings, which were caused by Japan.” As for the unnatural absence of relations with South Korea, Qian blamed this on the outcome of World War II. He added that as North-South relations, Japanese–North Korean relations, and American–North Korean relations improved, normalization between China and South Korea would be easy. “I would like to tell you that China encourages North Korea to have a dialogue with South Korea. We believe the United States and Japan can be helpful in improving the position of North Korea.”

Roh was ecstatic about the results of the meeting. He reminded his aides that during their interaction over many centuries past, the Korean kings always sent their emissaries to pay court to China, “but this time I received a kowtow” from the Chinese foreign minister.

In January 1992, in the wake of the Roh-Qian meeting and of a formal Sino–South Korean trade agreement signed in December, the Chinese Foreign Ministry held a series of strategic planning meetings that ended with a recommendation for full normalization with Seoul. A Chinese source said that, as a result, the Foreign Ministry listed normalization as one of its priority diplomatic objectives for 1992.

The timing of China’s move was unclear to Seoul until Qian confidentially informed the South Korean foreign minister, Lee Sang Ok, on
the morning of April 13, 1992, that China was ready to open negotiations leading to full-scale relations. The revelation was made in a conference between the two ministers at the State Guest House in Beijing, where Lee was staying as a participant in a meeting of a UN regional agency. The Chinese foreign minister, delivering the news in a matter-of-fact and soft-spoken way, emphasized that secrecy was essential.

Qian’s declaration caused great excitement in Seoul among the handful of officials who were told of it. The ensuing secret negotiations, including a monthlong pause while the Chinese prepared North Korea to absorb this new blow, took only four months. Together with the Korea policy reversal and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea on August 24, 1992, and the state visit of Roh Tae Woo to Beijing two months later created a dramatically changed geopolitical situation around the divided peninsula.

What brought about the Chinese resolve to move so quickly, according to sources on both sides, had less to do with the Korean peninsula than with China’s sensitivity to developments on Taiwan, where a campaign for greater international recognition had been intensifying. The worldwide flowering of Taiwan’s informal and paradiplomatic contacts and visits was disturbing to Beijing, and its few breakthroughs were maddening. In January 1992, the Baltic nation of Latvia, newly freed to seek its own destiny by the collapse of the Soviet Union, established official relations with Taiwan, despite intense protests from China. Shortly before the April decision to begin negotiations with South Korea, Beijing learned that the West African nation of Niger had decided to establish full diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The way to retaliate, Chinese leaders reasoned, was to move quickly to establish diplomatic relations with Seoul, thus forcing South Korea to drop its diplomatic ties with Taiwan and depriving Taiwan of its last remaining official toehold in Asia.

When Taiwanese authorities got wind of the secret PRC-ROK negotiations, they sent a high-ranking envoy, the secretary-general of the presidential office, to remind Seoul that the Nationalist governments of China, the lineal ancestors of the current Taiwan regime, had supported the Korean nationalists in exile during the Japanese occupation, given strong support to the independence of South Korea in UN politics in 1948, and been close comrades-in-arms in anticommunist struggles after Chiang Kai-shek had been forced into exile.

If Seoul snubbed Taiwan in the face of this long relationship, its representatives implied, Taiwan would retaliate by opening official relations and expanding its trade with North Korea. But if, on the other hand, Seoul managed to continue its diplomatic relations with Taiwan, South Korean firms would receive top priority in construction contracts and special trade benefits for five years. No such deal was in the cards, however. Taiwan had
little bargaining power, since for strategic as well as economic reasons, fully normalized relations with China were far more important to South Korea than its ties with Taiwan.

For China, the delicate question was how to manage the establishment of diplomatic relations with the South in a way that did not alienate the North, as the Soviet Union had done with Gorbachev’s abrupt maneuvers. This Beijing accomplished with accustomed political and diplomatic finesse. While carefully moving toward Seoul in October 1991, Chinese leaders hosted Kim Il Sung with elaborate ceremony in what they announced was his thirty-ninth visit since the founding of the DPRK, a ten-day tour in which he was accompanied for several days by Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin. In April 1992, as Seoul was being secretly informed of China’s willingness to initiate negotiations, Yang Shangkun, the president of the People’s Republic, traveled to Pyongyang and personally intimated to Kim Il Sung that the change was coming. In the midst of negotiations with Seoul, China sent its president’s brother, Yang Baibing, another powerful figure who was secretary-general of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, on an eight-day “goodwill visit” to North Korea.

After July 29, when the substance of the Sino–South Korean arrangements was fully agreed and secretly initialed by both sides, the Chinese insisted on delaying the announcement for nearly a month until August 24, evidently for the sole purpose of further preparing the way in Pyongyang. During this time Foreign Minister Qian took the news to Pyongyang in an unannounced trip that met with much greater understanding than had Shevardnadze’s tumultuous mission of the same sort two years earlier. Qian maintained that the normalization of relations with Seoul had been undertaken at the order of senior leader Deng Xiaoping, which left the North Koreans little room for argument.