The Reagan administration, which at this point was contemptuous of North Korea and busily preparing for the US presidential election in November, did not respond. But when the Washington Post placed my account of the interview on page 1, the North Korean diplomatic hesitation about me vanished, at least temporarily. After that I saw Kim or his senior deputy, Kang Sok Ju, nearly every time they came for their annual UN visits, even though their interview pronouncements never made the front page again.
In my 1991 meeting in Pyongyang, as in other meetings with him over the years, I found Kim Yong Nam a puzzling figure. In greetings before business began, he was cordial and relaxed, but once at work, he relentlessly followed his script in a way that reminded me of former Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. Koh Yong Hwan, a former North Korean diplomat and high-level interpreter who defected to the South, called Kim a “model” for North Korean officialdom: “If Kim Il Sung was pointing to a wall and said there is a door, Kim Yong Nam would believe that and try to go through it.” Yet by all accounts, he is highly intelligent and, due to his high position and prestige within the system, an important behind-the-scenes figure in Pyongyang.
The foreign minister’s polar opposite in demeanor was the colorful and flamboyant Kim Yong Sun, another important figure in Pyongyang’s diplomacy, whom I met for the first time on my 1991 trip. Born in 1934, his career path was notable for its craggy leaps and reverses. Originally a politically minded provincial official in the southeastern part of the country, he served in political posts in other areas before joining the International Department of the Workers Party. In the mid-1980s, he was demoted and reportedly sent to work in a coal mine as punishment for decadent behavior in organizing Western-style dancing at party headquarters. According to North Korean lore, he was rescued from oblivion by his friendship with Kim Kyong Hui, the younger sister of Kim Jong Il. In contrast to the austere foreign minister, Kim Yong Sun was reputed to be a hard-drinking, partying buddy of Kim Jong Il, a ladies’ man and devotee of high living.
Unlike all others whom I interviewed in Pyongyang in 1991, Kim Yong Sun did not wear a Western coat and tie but a zippered olive-drab short jacket similar to the US Army’s “Ike jacket.” Sitting across a conference table at Workers Party headquarters, he apologized for his casual dress, saying that he had come straight from a meeting with workers and peasants in the countryside, who had encouraged him to return quickly to the capital when he told them he had an appointment with Washington Post reporters. It was a somewhat flattering touch, until I learned from a delegation of American Quakers months later that he had told them the same story, wearing the same jacket, at the start of their meeting.
Kim Yong Sun had more self-confidence and flair than anyone else I met in North Korea. His authoritative yet freewheeling style appeared to be grounded in intimacy with the Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il was then known. It was notable that of a half-dozen senior officials I saw, only Kim Yong Sun volunteered to discuss the role of the Dear Leader, whom he described as “giving guidance in all fields: politics, economics, national defense, and diplomacy.” The party secretary said he received frequent personal instructions, including telephone calls, from Kim Jong Il.
While Kim Yong Sun’s fundamental positions did not deviate from the policy line of the party he served, he managed to present them in more accessible and impressive ways. At the end of our long conversation, which contained a plea for dialogue and cooperation with the United States, Kim said to me, “I understand you know Baker,” referring to the US secretary of state. “Please tell him I want to meet him.” Although he and other officials were highly critical of American policy, the fact of my presence and the messages they gave me suggested eagerness for a direct relationship with the United States. North Korea, it seemed, was seeking in its “own style” to compensate for its losses in the communist world. What wasn’t known at the time was that Kim Il Sung had already decided that normalizing relations with the United States was a strategic imperative to counter potential threats to the DPRK from China and Russia and that this goal would be the engine of North Korean foreign policy for years to come.
CHINA CHANGES COURSE
The Chinese foreign minister left Pyongyang several days before the end of my own weeklong trip, but the change in the relationship of the two Koreas to its giant neighbor continued to be a subject of immense importance on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel. And in the early 1990s, those relationships, like others involving the outside powers, were in flux. For China, the challenge was to adjust its relations from one-sided support of the North Korean ally to productive ties with both South and North. It was of great importance to Beijing to do so without suffering a precipitous loss of influence with Pyongyang, as had been the case with the Soviet Union.
As late as January 1979, senior leader Deng Xiaoping told President Carter that North Korea “trusts China” and that “we cannot have contact with the South, or it will weaken that trust.” Ironically, Deng’s own reformist policies of pragmatism and emphasis on market economic forces made it imperative for China to amend its one-sided policy of ignoring the South.
China and South Korea, situated across the Yellow Sea from one another and with complementary and increasingly vibrant economies, proved to be natural trading partners. Beginning with indirect commerce through Hong Kong and other places, Sino-ROK trade leaped from $19 million in 1979 to $188 million in 1980, $462 million in 1984, $1.3 billion in 1986, and $3.1 billion in 1988. Chinese trade with North Korea was left far behind, stagnating at about $0.5 billion in the late 1980s, much of it heavily subsidized by China. Although other aspects played their roles, this natural economic affinity with South Korea was of fundamental importance in overcoming Beijing’s inhibitions about dealings with Seoul. Party elders and aged former generals could reminisce about their exploits with North Korea in bygone times, but South Korea loomed much larger for officials dealing with the economy.
In 1985 a small Chinese delegation visited Seoul, ostensibly for an academic exchange. On its return, it produced a report for Deng Xiaoping about South Korea and the possibilities for improving PRC-ROK relations. After reading the report, Deng reportedly wrote in the margin, “We need to expedite development of China–South Korea relations.” Quiet meetings between Chinese delegations led by China International Trust and Investment Company chairman Rong Yi-ren and South Korean business leaders followed in Seoul and Beijing. Anxious to move as quickly as possible, the next year the South Koreans offered China a five-year, $2.5 billion interest-free loan if Beijing would establish ties. Many on the Chinese side were in favor of accepting, but Foreign Minister Qian rejected the idea, arguing that China could not afford to alienate North Korea. Over the next several years, Qian vetoed a number of proposals for establishing relations, much to the annoyance of those Chinese officials who wanted to move ahead. Even Vice Premier Tian Ji-yun, the head of the special “South Korean Affairs Office” established for dealing with Seoul, fumed at Qian’s obduracy but was unable to overrule him. One member of the Chinese group went back and forth so often that at one point, the South Koreans went to a Seoul tailor to buy him a new suit, hoping to make him less conspicuous. “The American and the Taiwan embassies are watching you,” his Korean contacts told him.
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 Minis
try 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.
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Page 29