U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has reportedly instructed U.S. diplomats to engage like-minded countries in reaching out to Beijing to express concerns about North Korea sending troops into Russia. Such appeals to Beijing are likely to have little effect because China has shown no inclination over the last two years of the conflict to interfere in Vladimir Putin’s conduct of the war and, indeed, has been the major source of both military-industrial and economic assistance. That said, China has shown a great deal of anxiety over the trajectory of the relationship between their difficult neighbor Kim Jong-un and Putin because it does not wish to be associated with an “axis of upheaval.” The United States and its allies might do well to consider leveraging this Chinese angst by offering joint clandestine intelligence and collection operations designed to ascertain both the future dimensions of the North Korea-Russia alliance and the extent to which President Putin is providing dangerous advanced military technology in exchange for Pyongyang’s support to the war effort.
It is often said that President Xi Jinping has been performing a “balancing act” ever since Putin invaded Ukraine but North Korea’s decision to send troops to Russia has now turned this into a more precarious high wire performance. Since the war began, China’s first priority has been to ensure that Putin did not suffer a defeat that causes his downfall. Xi has found common cause with Putin over the perception that the West is attempting to suppress them and cannot be sure that a new Russian leader would be as like-minded and eager for a partnership. At the same time, China’s broader economic and diplomatic priority was to appear neutral to ensure that Beijing’s relations with Europe, East Asia, and to a lesser extent the United States, remained stable.
In many ways, Xi’s balancing act has succeeded as only Washington has taken any steps to exact a price from Beijing for its collusion with Putin. Soon after the war began, China publicly assured the world that it would not provide Putin with lethal military aid. At the same time, however, Beijing started secretly providing critical assistance to Putin to strengthen and expand his military production capabilities. China successfully hid this assistance for over a year until the United States disclosed sensitive findings that in 2023 about 90% of Russia’s microelectronics, used in missiles, tanks, aircraft, and large numbers of advanced machine tools had come from China. In mid-October, Washington sanctioned two China-based drone suppliers and their Russian partners for producing long-range armed drones in China for Putin’s war. China has denied that it has provided any of this support.
Kim’s decision to send troops to Russia places Xi in a much more delicate position. Kim’s action is highly visible to the world and North Korea’s status as a long-term client state to China raises question about potential Chinese complicity. China has worked assiduously to convince foreign capitals that it is not part of an “axis of upheaval” or that it wants “bloc politics” in Northeast Asia. However, North Korea’s actions now provide fodder from those convinced that this axis is forming or has already formed. Uncomfortable for some time with the Kim-Putin entente, China has not even acknowledged the troop deployment and, indeed, has never reported or commented publicly on the “Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” that Putin and Kim signed in June during Putin’s first visit to North Korea in twenty-four years.
A major concern for Beijing is exactly what price Kim is extracting from Putin for the millions of rounds of ammunition, short-range ballistic missiles, and now soldiers for the war. A somewhat menacing North Korea is probably in China’s interest to keep the United States and its Northeast Asia allies off balance, but China has been careful not to provide Kim with advanced nuclear and conventional military capabilities in order to keep him from destabilizing the region and providing greater impetus for a U.S.-led collective defense framework with Japan, South Korea and others. Beijing has to be wondering if Putin is now prepared to cross that line.
Chinese interlocutors appear to be completely in the dark as to the agreements between North Korea and Moscow. This is not surprising as China-North Korea relations have never recovered from Kim’s execution of his uncle Jang Song-thaek in December 2013. China had signed a raft of economic agreements with Jang just the year before and there are suspicions in Beijing that Kim killed him, in part, because he was too close to China. Moreover, North Korea resents the fact that China has kept the country on an economic IV drip for years.
China’s angst over the ever-closer Putin-Kim relationship provides an opportunity to explore a joint, covert intelligence collection and analysis initiative. U.S. and Chinese intelligence sharing has somewhat ironically been a feature of the relationship since Deng Xiaoping visited Washington in 1979. NBC News reported that a U.S. official told them that CIA Director William Burns had visited Beijing in May 2023 in the aftermath of the U.S. shootdown of a Chinese spy balloon in April. Burns apparently was the first U.S. cabinet member Biden sent to Beijing to restore direct contact. The official said that the trip was “to emphasize the importance of maintaining open lines of communication and intelligence channels.” Beijing may find it in its interest to cooperate with Washington if only to dampen concerns about the “axis of upheaval.”
Dennis Wilder is a former senior American intelligence official and policymaker. He currently serves as a professor of practice at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow of Georgetown University's Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues. From 2004 to 2009, he served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asia. From 2009 to 2015, he was the senior editor of the President’s Daily Brief, the intelligence publication of the Director of National Intelligence delivered daily. He served as CIA's deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific from 2015 to 2016.
