The importance of China in negotiations with North Korea over its efforts to build nuclear weapons cannot be understated..China’s potential role in bringing North Korea to heel is an example of why it behooves the United States to work with other countries. Some countries have a more immediate and direct stake in a neighbor’s behavior than the Unite States, such as China does in this case. These countries may have leverage the United States lacks.

North Korea matters to China. Beijing does not want an erratic and volatile neighbor that, as the expression says, “goes nuclear” and induces an American invasion. China does not want thousands of American troops hard by its border.

Of paramount importance to China is a calm periphery. Chinese leaders for the past quarter century have strived to maintain peace and stability on China’s borders so that they can concentrate on economic modernization. Communist Party leaders have staked their continued grip on power to ongoing improvements in the prosperity of the Chinese people.

What happens in Korea has ramifications in China because China has the second highest “overseas” ethnic Korean population in the world, behind the United States. Upheaval in North Korea means refugees in China. Nearly 2 million ethnic Koreans live in the three provinces that border North Korea. Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang – the border provinces – comprise China’s rust belt, an area of aging industries, extreme unemployment, and increasing labor agitation. Chinese leaders do not need refugees exacerbating these problems.

China provides North Korea with extensive aid to keep it from imploding. According to Alexandr Nemets and John L. Scherer, China’s aid amounted to $450 million in 2000, primarily crude oil, petroleum products and foodstuffs. Some experts reckon that China provides two-thirds of North Korea’s non-nuclear fuel needs.

Even the United States contributes humanitarian food aid to North Korea, irrespective of political factors, providing roughly 155,000 metric tons in 2002 alone. Foreign aid has kept the country from starving and the despicable Kim Jong-Il regime from collapsing but it has also kept it from developing nuclear weaponry, so far.

While Beijing has simultaneously shored up and distanced itself from the Pyongyang regime, China has befriended South Korea over the past decade, seeing increased economic ties as a boost to its modernization efforts. In 1992 the two countries normalized relations and since then trade has risen from $5 billion to $44 billion in 2002. China became South Korea’s third largest trading partner last year, trailing only the United States and Japan.

The immediate need is to make sure North Korea does not deploy nuclear-tipped missiles, which, though they do not directly threaten the United States, already threaten three of America’s seven largest trading partners: Japan, China, and South Korea. In 1998, North Korea successfully fired a test missile up and over Japan.

North Korea’s tactic of pursuing nuclear weaponry is a tacit admission of weakness. Without nuclear weapons, North Korean leaders fear that they cannot stave off a conventional American military invasion like the one that overran Iraq. Similarly, North Korea has targeted Seoul, South Korea’s capital, with hundreds of artillery and missile batteries. By vowing to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” if the United States and South Korea ever invaded, Pyongyang seeks to deter an attack by saying it would be too costly even if successful.

What the Pyongyang leadership wants above all else is an agreement that the United States will not invade North Korea as it did Iraq, another member of the “axis of evil.” But given the Bush Administration’s national security strategy, in which pre-emptive actions are justified to protect the United States, that kind of “non-aggression” guarantee is exactly what the administration cannot offer. This is what makes multilateral cooperation with North Korea’s neighbors, especially China, all the more important.

However, there are those who argue out that Pyongyang is pretty adept at getting what it wants out of other countries.

In a July article in the Christian Science Monitor, Kathryn Weathersby of the Korea Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s project on the history of the cold war said that Beijing and Moscow “gave a lot of aid but gained very limited leverage” over Pyongyang.

But this is a different era than the cold war. Back then North Korea could capitalize on the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s – a fissure that President Nixon exploited when he went to China in 1972. China and the USSR marshaled communist regimes like pawns on a chessboard, giving North Korea the opportunity to play the two communist giants off each other.

Today, the United States has little leverage in getting North Korea to desist from its nuclear endeavors, save bribery. If the United States cuts back its humanitarian aid it would face a public relations disaster. China provides a wider array of aid that can – with care – be withheld if push comes to shove.

However, any move to cut China’s fuel aid to North Korea could provide Pyongyang with a rationale and a cover for continuing to use and develop nuclear power plants that can produce weapons-grade plutonium.

It is these limitations with China’s and the United State’s individual leverage that make it imperative that the United States, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan – the entire neighborhood – maintain a united front during negotiations that open in Beijing late this month, so that Pyongyang will not be able to wriggle very much.

Gordon Bonin of Orono recently graduated with a masters degree in international relations and international communication from Boston University.